A Hunt For Treasurely Things
by JagfreySmithums
Summary: Tommy Brown is living in desperate poverty with his crippled grandfather when a mysterious new girl in his homeroom class at school gives him an object that isn't quite what it seems. First four chapters. 11 coming, plus dictionary of Xarcanthian dialect.


**A HUNT FOR TREASURELY THINGS**

 **CHAPTER ONE**

 **The Little Butterfly Magnet**

OLD TWEED JACKETS with brown leather patches at the elbows could hardly be thought of as standard school-wear for most fourth-graders. Yet a tattered and leprechaun-green version of this very jacket was wom each and every day to Victoria-Albert School by a thin, nine-year-old lad of average height whose name, it so happened, was Thomas Shyler Brown.

Anyone looking at him for the very first time ought not to have noticed anything peculiar in those coffee-coloured eyes which seemed to smile. Nor should they have seen much amiss in a head of blondish, wavy hair that, apart from being shoulder length and in dire need of a good trim, was likely to darken up as he grew older. He took home good marks on every report card. He did not have pink-spotted horns sprouting from his head or ears that whistled the Canadian national anthem. Furthermore, he seemed quite as agile and healthy and normal as anyone could be.

So why did there exist such a universal unwillingness to befriend or even speak with him, and why - without any proof to corroborate such an absurd notion was he generally considered to be Winnipeg's poster boy of weirdness?

Little did his unpopularity have to do with those squeaky, three-sizes-too-large runners he wore, which had him tripping over just about every sidewalk cranny there was. And while that nondescript aroma his socks sometimes exuded won him a fair degree of sour and sickly looks, Herbert Hanratty insisted it pleasantly reminded him of his bedroom at home, not to mention that ripping hot summer he had spent on the farm with his cousins, the Pigsplitzens.

Head-scratching occasions arose when wads of mysteriously vanishing gum some pupils were positive they had stuck under their desks prior to going to the washroom or wandering up front to ask the teacher a question coincided with Tommy being seen chomping on something he hadn't been chomping on before. Still, unlike Ernie Flackbart, he at least refrained from turning pens into lethal blowguns and shooting bits of chewed-up paper through them at unsuspecting victims the instant the teacher's back was turned. And, as much unlike Dean Bean as it was possible to be, his most gratifying moments in life did not include cruelly taping pieces of foolscap to the legs of freshly-caught flies then letting them sail around the room scaring the living daylights out of his teacher and fellow classmates.

No, the undesirable reputation Tommy Brown had come to acquire at Victoria-Albert School was absolutely, completely, entirely, positively, solely, totally and wholly due to that grotesque, several-sizes-too-large jacket he insisted on wearing everywhere he went, and that's all there was to it.

The coattails of this twilled monstrosity were frequently heard scuffing along the ground behind a pair of baggy, grass- stained blue jeans and burnt orange T-shirt, its sleeves rolled up into giant, thick-banded cuffs. Its ten chunky wood buttons (there had been twelve originally, three on each sleeve and six down thefront of it) dangled precariously on loose threads and were known to tangle in the frizzled tresses of longer-haired pupils when the hallways became crowded at noon and home-time. That the jacket was long out-of-style and fit to be condemned was practically undeniable after Brantley Buffalotrot once patted Tommy on the back during a spelling-bee and stirred up so much dust that their teacher Mrs. Holmes had to crank open several windows and air out the entire room.

If Mrs. Holmes - a tall, thin, conservatively dressed woman with dark-rimmed glasses and coifed black hair piled up high on her head - ever disapproved of such unseemly attire being worn to class she never once expressed this view openly to her pupils. You see, the Point Douglas neighbourhood in which Victoria-Albert School was located ranked at this moment in time as being one of Canada's poorest, and some children, through no fault of their own, had little choice in the matter. In Tommy's case, she had heard all manner of rumours and tales: how he was known to rummage through alleyway dumpsters for returnable bottles; how he had to look after his grandfather left crippled by a car accident that had also killed Tommy's parents on the day he was born.

In addition to his sneaking into the washroom now and again to slip a few rolls of toilet paper into his backpack, she also knew he sometimes filled an empty water bottle with soap from the dispensers to take home with him. She knew this because Barry Wilcox and Gilroy Madison had caught him at it red-handed and had taken it upon themselves to tell on him - maliciously, of course, to get him into trouble.

Tattling for all the wrong reasons, however, was something Mrs. Holmes favoured loads less than Tommy occasionally pinching a few necessities his disabled grandfather may not have been able to afford. After all, pilfering a bit of soap and toilet paper - not that she by any means condoned it - would have hardly driven the entire school division into bankruptcy and seemed less punishment-worthy than, say, two "angelic souls" vandalizing school property because they had nothing better to do with their time.

It was to note that Barry and Gilroy both shared tense glances when she expressed these views to them, having secretly spray-painted graffiti on the back wall of the school themselves a day or so previous. Moreover, the pointed look Mrs. Holmes had given them left a distinct impression she was aware they were the ones responsible. Even so, she never accused them outright of the disreputable deed; she merely mentioned that two strapping young volunteers were needed for a special clean-up project, which they could get started on as soon as she fetched some scrub brushes and a wash bucket from the school custodian.

Knowing how difficult living on next to nothing must have been, coupled with Tommy having to fit in with a comparatively more privileged set, may have made her turn a blind eye to such behaviour. But it did seem somewhat promising to observe in him the streak of a fighter and that he wasn't about to let himself be pushed around simply because, at this relatively short period in his life, he stood out as being the blackest sheep in the flock.

For example, while approaching the school doors one frosty winter's morning (now this was last year when classes had reconvened after the Christmas holidays), Mrs. Holmes saw a pretty, green-eyed pupil named Minnie McBiggins waggling a beautiful charm bracelet at him that shimmered with silver trains, dinosaurs, skates and sultans.

"See-e? Look what I got for Christmas," she had been taunting him nastily. "What'd you get, loser?"

"A break from spoiled, rotten brats such as yourself, that's what," Tommy had hurled back at her, "and a better idea of what Christmas is really about besides how much cheap, lousy junk you can rake in once a year that nobody even needs! That stuff ends up in a landfill after you get tired of it, and pretty soon there won't be any room for trees and animals, all so you and a trillion other people can walk around wearing garbage you think makes you look cool or special!"

Not being his teacher at the time Mrs. Holmes had chosen to disregard the incident, except that it did make her wonder how things would be if such a pupil ever got placed in her class. Tales Tommy's third-grade teacher brought into the staff room practically everyday in and around that period had been enough to curl anyone's teeth, and it hadn't gone unnoticed how Mrs. Wublunski's hair had tinselled up remarkably since the beginning of the school year. Rumours she had been seen sneaking swigs from a paper bag she kept hidden in her handbag were all but dismissed by Mrs. Holmes as the purest fudge and flibbertigibbet.

Late in the summer, though, when the new classroom lists were finally posted and Tommy's name leapt off her own roster in blinding neon, the idea of investing in a few just-in-case bottles of bubbly prior to the first day of school somehow seemed less fanciful and far-fetched.

On that particular September morning, after most of the bright, studious faces of Mrs. Holmes's new pupils had flocked into class, some oversized runners heard squeaking up the corridor reached a deafening crescendo outside her door and Tommy shuffled inside for the very first time. Draped in his all-too-familiar tweed jacket, the few inches he had grown over the summer were not enough to keep it from dragging along the floor behind him. A droopy gait and sullen expression also presented the picture of someone none too happy that this was to be the start of three whole terms in Mrs. Holmes's class, the reason for which was shortly brought to bear in a most appalling and mean-spirited manner.

In the midst of wishing Tommy a cheerful good-morning as he was slouching past her desk, Mrs. Holmes was interrupted by a loud chorus of overdramatic gasps and disappointed groans from the children already seated.

"You've got to be joking!" bickered one of the pupils. "Out of all the kids that go to this school how come we had to get stuck with Tommy Brown?"

"Anyone bring some air freshener and a fly swat?" fleered someone from someone from one of the back desks.

"Quick, hide the waste bucket!" quipped another to the uproarious mirth of several pupils.

Feeling himself growing stiffer than an old ironing board, Tommy hastened his stride across the front of the class, never expecting to ignite additional laughter when his knee, unexpectedly bashing itself against one of the desks, exploded sharply in pain. As humorous as the incident may have seemed to her pupils, to Mrs. Holmes it was anything but. Frown deepening as Tommy limped his way down the end row to a spot by himself alongside the windows, she seized a pointer lying on the chalk-holder behind her and slammed it hard upon her desk, instantly transforming their insensitive joviality into startled silence.

"That is no way to welcome anyone into their new fourth grade class!" she bellowed at them angrily.

"It is if it's Tommy Brown," snickered one of the pupils, thereby provoking another round of more subdued yet highly amused chuckles.

From the way Mrs. Holmes looked as she pushed back her chair and stood up from her desk you'd have thought she had just snorted a rotten sardine up her left nostril. "Not only was that a cruel and heartless thing to say," she hotly admonished the class, "I doubt any of you would feel very nice if an entire room full of people you may not even know groaned at you on your first day back to school.

"We'd all be surprised if they didn't if we were as weird as Tommy Brown is," someone else nattered just loud enough for everyone to overhear. As might be expected, a wave of half-suppressed tittering went splashing across the room but was quick to founder against a rocky reef none were anticipating.

"If that's the case," Mrs. Holmes squalled in stern reproach, "then let me surprise you all with a detention." Like an offbeat metronome, her heels clicked round to the front of her desk over what was now a very authentic symphony of gasps and groans. Propping herself against the edge of it and folding her arms, she panned their disgruntled faces in frowning silence until the last grumble had subsided. "I won't have anyone in this class being singled out or made to feel unwelcome for any reason," she lectured them crossly. "Making fun of someone I don't think many of you even know very well is rude, thoughtless and uncalled for, and you are all certainly old enough to know better."

"Well, I'm not doing no detention for something didn't say," declared another pupil in a huff. "Forget it!"

"You'll all be doing exactly what I tell you to," Mrs. Holmes retorted matter-of-factly, "or your parents will have to sign you up at another school, it's that simple. You needn't imagine I am in any way delighted to be handing out detentions to my entire fourth-level class on their very first day back from the summer holidays. It's an unfortunate first for me, especially when I haven't even had a chance to do the roll call yet. But you've got nobody to blame for it except yourselves, and you had all better hope this sort of thing never comes to my attention again. In this country, we tolerate and show respect for everyone, regardless of who they are. We do not bully them and we certainly do not laugh at them when they have done nothing to us.

"Now, as I call your name please come up to the front of the class and collect your textbooks - one from each of the piles lined up on the floor beneath the blackboard..."

Least surprised he had managed to stir up trouble by simply having shown up was Tommy. In Mrs. Wublunski's third-grade class the previous year, barely a day had slipped by without somebody trying to land him in hot water for doing something he had not.

As an example, Abigail Fudrabbage had once stormed up to Mrs. Wublunski's desk in a steaming huff, insisted Tommy had been pulling her hair all morning and demanded she phone the police to have him dragged off to jail for the next hundred-bilion years. The obvious fact, as Mrs. Wublunski pointed out, that his seat happened to be situated three rows away from hers and the accused would have needed elastic arms in order to engage in such an activity did not dissuade Abigail one gyp. Storming back down the aisle, and snatching up her books, and marching over to a vacant spot in front of Tommy's she slammed them onto the desktop, threw herself defiantly down onto the chair and all but shouted:

"Therel Now do you believe me, Mrs. Wublunski?"

Incidents of tacks magically showing up on the teacher's chair or, say, a rotten pear getting hurled anonymously at the blackboard while her back was turned were invariably blamed on You-Know-Who by the entire class. Calls of "Everyone pile on Tommy!" at recess had rarely gone ignored, and guess who got the bumps if anyone so much as hinted to the Birthday Bump Committee that their special day had arrived? Getting elbowed or tripped as he was wandering up the aisle was certainly nothing new, and dodging long-range, state-of-the-art water pistols bursting with foul, fithy substances out in the hallways come home-time had occurred so frequently it almost seemed passé.

In spite of these nefarious antics, Tommy knew (and who better?) that there was really nothing wrong with him, not that it should have mattered even if there was. He took comfort in an oft-repeated expression of his grandfathers: "what comes around goes around", and if others considered him a doormat on which to wipe their muddy attitudes then so be it; at some point in time, it would all come back to haunt them. Besides, who knew he wasn't helping the bullies of today hone up the very people-skills they would need after they eventually dropt out of school and took on such rewarding careers in the workaday world as Assistant Car Thief and Junior Street Ruffian? And what was it to Tommy if such was the hard, rocky road down which they had chosen to travel? He, at least, was here to make a difference in the world; he could feel it and always had.

On the very first day of school, most classes were usually let out in a few short hours once everyone received their textbooks and had listened to their teacher summarize what they would be covering in the upcoming term. Not so today. Roll call taken, schoolbooks distributed among those present, Mrs. Holmes calmly began handing out blank foolscap to everyone except Tommy, whom she whispered could leave when she reached his desk.

As he was stepping across to the door, every eye welded resentfully on him, Mrs. Holmes informed the pupils they would be writing her an essay entitled Placing Ourselves in the Shoes of Others then reading each aloud to the rest of the class to critique and discuss in-depth.

"We might as well make a day of it," she added contritely, "so when you all return from lunch" (an announcement that incited another flash-flood of discontentment since nobody expected they would be returning at all), "make sure you come prepared to take notes. We'll be discussing a range of delightful topics such as Intolerance and the Reasons Behind It, Dealing With Anger Effectively, and the Importance of Being Respectful of Others followed by a thirty-minute quiz to see how much you've all learnt. Granted, this may not be the standard curriculum for any fourth-level class, but judging by the behaviour you exhibited earlier, it seems long overdue. Yes?"

"What about him?" cried an embittered student Tommy could still hear as he stumbled and squeaked his way further down the corridor outside. "Why does he get to leave while we have to sit here for the rest of the day?"

More voices swelled in restless mutiny, but the ship's captain seemed fully prepared to weather the stormiest seas of discontent.

"Settle down or you'll stay longer," she warned her restless crew. This detention is about your behaviour, not his. It's about learning a better way to treat others. I thought that was made perfectly clear to you "

Evidently, however, the lesson Mrs. Holmes tried to teach them failed to sink in, and from thereon in things went straight downhill for one particular tweed-jacketed pupil. Over the succeeding days, word spread throughout the school that Tommy had nearly got everyone in his entire class expelled and was responsible for making them sit through a gruelling day-long detention when they could have been outside enjoying the last of autumn's good weather. Several of his classmates claimed that, because of Tommy-the-Barf-Bag Brown, they had to opt out of going on long-anticipated trips to the Interlake and Grand Beach, a picnic at Bird's Hill Park as well as a coveted afternoon of cow tipping at Pigsplitzen Farm. As such, if Tommy had had the slimmest chance of being tacked onto anyone's Friendship List, his name was quickly blotted out in cold black Marks-a-Lot.

About the only occasions he wasn't purposely avoided were when other children ganged up on him at recess to steal his runners and throw them in puddles of mud or up into the trees. They teased and taunted him endlessly went running past on the spur of the moment shouting, "I hate you-u!" savagely in his ear or to slap "Kick Me" signs on his back. Nobody talked to him, nobody looked or smiled at him unless it was absolutely necessary, practically everyone cringed at the mere mention of his name, and all because of that ugly twilled jacket he refused to part company with.

Why he wore it to begin with seemed to defy all common sense until some weeks after the start of first term a new girl, who had recently transferred in from another inner city school, approached him at recess as he was sitting by himself on the main steps.

"Why do you even wear that ratty old thing if all it does is cause you trouble?" asked Penelope Winston, whose auburn hair, thanks to two velvety ribbons pinker than a Baby's Breath, cascaded in fountains of curls down either side of her lightly freckled face. Even though she only sat a few vacant seats up from Tommy's desk in the same row, they had never actually spoken before now. But it hadn't escaped his admiring attention how rapidly she had become Mrs Holmes's star pupil, always achieving the highest marks on practically every quiz and test.

"It's all I've got left of my father's," he shrugged resignedly. "He died in this jacket the day I was born. Any other questions?"

"Just one," she answered, holding up a skipping rope. "Do you want to play jump rope with me? Or are you going to tell me that's girl's stuff and then just sit there like a bump on a log until the bell rings?"

"I'll play jump rope with you," offered Minnie McBiggins, rushing up out of nowhere and eyeballing Tommy as if he was something revolting a dog had left behind on the grass and she had just rescued Penelope from stepping in it.

Though it mattered little to Tommy that Minnie had always gone out of her way to be mean to him, it did leave him wondering how two polar opposites that is to say, herself and her much more amiable brother Bradley - ever managed to have been raised by the exact same parents.

The closest thing to a friend Tommy had ever known, Bradley McBiggins sometimes ran ahead of the others after classes let out and waited for Tommy just around the corner on Elgin Avenue so they could walk home together the rest of the way. He felt more amused than bothered by Bradley constantly throwing nervous glances behind them as they trooped homewards, and laughed at the paranoiac fashion he went darting behind the closest shrub or tree if anyone he thought he knew went driving by.

Nobody wanted to be seen with somebody known to rummage through other people's garbage and dress in dishevelled, oversized clothes, Minnie McBiggins especially. To her, Bradley and Tommy's friendship was even grosser than hearing how Bradley had gone to school one morning wearing his father's dirty underwear, which Mr. McBiggins had left lying the bathroom floor while showering and were indistinguishable from the clean ones Bradley had accidentally dropt beside them. Yet, in spite of her cruellest, rudest efforts to make Tommy feel unwelcome whenever he came by to practice pitches or toss hoops with Bradley, he still ranked as the thickest straw in Bradley's milkshake, and Bradley the mustard, pickles and cheese on Tommy's peanut butter sandwich.

"Can you skip double-dutch?" Penelope enquired of Minnie as they turned to leave. But pausing, evidently recalling something that had slipped her mind, and dipping a hand into one of her pockets, she removed a small glass butterfly with a round magnet on the back of it. "Oh, I almost forgot," she smiled, handing it to Tommy. "I thought I saw this fall out of your pocket earlier on and wanted to give it back to you. G. Willy Winklebush, it looks like one of those Wish Magnets you stick on your fridge, doesn't it?"

"I don't know." shrugged Tommy, looking the object over. "I don't even think it's mine."

"Well, it is now, I suppose," Penelope called over her shoulder while Minnie hastened her away to a Tommy-free spot across the schoolyard.

"Wish Magnet," he repeated wonderingly

Held by an elastic against the side of the object was a small, neatly-folded slip of paper that he removed and unfolded. Inked across the top of it in Old English lettering was the name of a very unfamiliar establishment: Mrs. Trinket's Old Haberdashery Shop. Underneath it were two short verses, which Tommy read aloud to himself, written in calligraphic letters as follows:

 _On doors small or large_

 _Where I have been stuck_

 _Three taps and a wish_

 _May bring you good luck._

 _Surprised you may be_

 _To open this door_

 _And see things inside_

 _That weren't there before._

"A magic magnet that grants wishes to people?" Tommy considered sceptically. "G. Willy Winklebush, imagine that."

Apart from being a pretty sort of thing (the wings of it somewhat reminded him of a stained-glass window and its thin, transparent feelers were tipped with black), there was really nothing lucky or magical looking about it. But the first indication that the little glass butterfly may not have been a very typical magnet came a few minutes after he shoved it in his pocket. He felt jiggles of movement as though it had started fluttering around, yet several peeks revealed nothing extraordinary going on inside, nothing unusual or unexpected.

Numerous instances throughout the afternoon nonetheless kept giving him the strangest feeling that the little glass butterfly had been squirming around on its own, and he repeatedly pulled it out of his pocket to examine it more closely on his way home from school.

A little bruised, a little scratched around the edges, the little Elgin Avenue bungalow Tommy and his grandfather had called home for nearly nine years had been abandoned a fair while before they had quietly taken up residence within it.

At that time, clapboards nailed over its windows and doors were discreetly taken down and a fresh coat of leprechaun- green paint slathered over the wood- slatted housefront. Luckily the taps were still working. But the City had shut off all power to the dwelling, so several extension cords had been plugged together and secretly strung out to a lonely little garage outlet a few houses down.

Trailing in through a metal vent by the rear door, this lengthy procession of cords snaked from room to room, providing power to lamps and plug-in heaters and an ancient television set with rabbit ears that needed constant tweaking. Even the old-style refrigerator in the kitchen held its own better than anyone could have hoped, chugging and clunking in odd, occasional fits the way steam-powered locomotives did in the previous century. Across from it, the cooker in which someone's great-great grandmother might have burnt her first batch of cookies as a young girl, could still boil and cook with the best of them, although lights around the house often dimmed if the oven and more than one element got turned on together.

Weeks old when they had first moved in, Tommy naturally had no memory of it but gradually became aware over time that their living in that little bungalow at all may not have been entirely on the up and up. During art period - now this is going back to last year again when Tommy was in the third grade - he happened to overhear two classmates engaged in a quiet discussion concerning him as he had been walking past their table to the supply cabinet. "My gramma told me Tommy Brown is living in the same house old Mrs. Kelly died in years ago," one of the pupils had mentioned to the other. "She fell down the basement stairs and nobody found her for almost a whole year ('Ew-w, grossl"). "My gramma knows for a fact that the Browns aren't related to her because old Mrs. Kelly didn't have any relatives to speak of, so she never would have left it to them in her will. According to my gramma, that would mean the Browns would have had to have bought that house, which doesn't make sense seeing how they're so poor" ("Well, what does your gramma say about that?"). "She thinks the Browns are really rich and just pretending to be poor so everyone will feel sorry for them and give them stuff. And" - lowering her voice to whisper - "she wants me to get Tommy's number so she can phone up his grandfather once she gets a divorce and-" Here the two classmates, having noticed Tommy listening nearby, gasped and after a quick, "I'll tell you the rest later," said nothing more.

It went without saying that Mrs. Henderson, a long-time family friend, had helped Tommy's grandfather settle into the bungalow after he was discharged from the hospital simply because, apart from her, there had been no one else to assist him in that regard.

Stout and kind-natured, the last raven black strands of her shoulder-length hair appeared to be fighting a losing battle against a massive uprising of rebel grey invaders. Living next door to the Browns in a modest two-story house she kept immaculate, the backs of her great dimpled arms often jiggled when she chuckled but blended in marvellously with an overall look ot earthiness in her square-jawed features and heavy, large-busted frame.

Precisely how she had prevented Tommy from being adopted by a foster care family when he was scarcely weeks old and Gramps was in the hospital recovering from the accident was a question Bradley McBiggins once brought up for which Tommy had no answer. He also thought it mystifying how Mrs. Henderson, little more than a family friend without any involvement in the accident herself, had secured permission to have the tire-stripped wreckage Tommy's parents had died in towed into her own backyard where it had rested ever since on four big chocks.

However much he mulled these things over in his mind, Bradley was unable to arrive upon a single theory that could fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle. And Tommy, not really much interested in the whole business to begin with, could provide about as much enlightenment on the subject as a houseplant, aside from saying he doubted Gramps would be able to recall or that Mrs. Henderson would be willing to discuss it.

On mid-summer nights too sweltering to sleep indoors Tommy was often partial to sneaking outside with his pillow, going next door and snuggling up in the backseat of the rusty, smashed-up vehicle. The vinyl seats were quite a lot cooler to sleep on, and he could put up dumpster-recovered screens over the smashed windows to keep out the mosquitoes.

As things turned out, however, Mrs. Henderson's sobs woke him early one morning and, peeking out, Tommy spied her standing by her back door staring forlornly at the wreckage. In light of almost getting caught doing something he oughtn't (Mrs. Henderson would hardly have lavished smiles, hugs or kisses on him if she ever learnt he had been sleeping in the vehicle the entire night), he decided never to do so again.

Questioning her about why she had been balling her eyes out that morning was definitely out of the question, she would have asked how he knew she had been there to begin with, thus aggravating a nervous affiction of Tommy's called Boova Shlump's Disorder, a major symptom of which included the uncontroliable telling of fibs and falsehoods. He suspected her sorrowful display may have had something to do with her own husband, whom she had lost years ago but refused to talk about with anyone. All the same, Tommy wasn't about to bring up any subject that was sad enough to send Mrs. Henderson into such great despair given how nice she had always been to them.

Nice she had definitely been, for instance, to have recently spruced up the outside of their house by nailing up jalousies on either side of the picture window and painting them, as well as the wood trim on all the windows, a darker grassy green. Over the summer, Tommy had practically redone the whole roof himself - something he, at least, thought looked quite sharp - using stacks of green-tinted shingles and a staple-gun he contended someone had discarded in one of the refuse bins a couple of blocks away.

Since old shingles were typically weather-faded and riddled with staple holes, Mrs. Henderson was hard-pressed to take Tommy at his word. Neither was she fully convinced he had rescued dozens of flourishing balsams and begonias a few days later from some of the back-alleyway dumpsters. A likelier scenario was that he had "rescued" them from several gardens in people's private yards, in which case Tommy should be thanking his lucky stars the authorities hadn't caught him at it.

Nonetheless after much sermonizing on the ills of stealing, she grudgingly consented to lend her assistance in planting them along the front of the house. At the end of her labours, there were enough left over to fill a narrow patch of soil running alongside the chain-link fence at the front of the yard.

"I should've made you take them all back to where you got them from," she had told him stoically, removing her gardening gloves and gazing askance at her handiwork. "And I'll do just that if I ever catch you rattling boldly up the street with another shopping cart full of stolen plants again. Earn your way through life the proper way, Thomas - through hard work and by keeping your nose clean. And remember: stealing brings bad luck to the stealer's doorstep: an old saying of my dear mother's, but truer than any of us may ever know."

Such were the words that rang in Tommy's ears as he loped through the chain-link gate into the oak-shaded yard and up the concrete-tiled path to the front entrance. Because of the narrowness of the yard itself the house had been built on it sidewise instead of lengthwise, but the layout inside was simple.

The front door opened directly into a small sitting-room that had a square picture window overlooking the street. A hallway scooted left to the back of the house, midway along which Gramps's bedroom door stood a few steps past the kitchen entrance on the opposite side, with Tommy's at the end. Between the two bedrooms a no-frills bathroom was positioned next to a small black-painted door with steps behind it leading down to the basement.

The vast majority of their dishes, cutlery, glassware, household accessories and furniture Tommy had found in his searches through dumpsters for empty ottles some of the local vendors were willing to pay him ten-cents each for. It was hard work, but he brought it all home to fix whatever needed fixing, then clean and polish and have looking spick and span new in no time.

Books and clothes and tables and wall hangings were just some of the perfectly usable things Tommy had uncovered over the past summer alone. People simply threw stuff out that got so much as a single scratch, it seemed, the tiniest stain or fray or wasn't quite up to snuff or trendy anymore. But nobody needed to know the Brown's house was filled with other people's throwaways; most would have turned up their noses at them without giving a hoot about what their own just-toss-it-away attitudes were doing to the environment.

Wheelchair-bound since the accident, unable to go anywhere by himself work or do many activities others took for granted, Gramps often wondered how he would have survived if it weren't for his only grandson. It was Tommy who helped get him out of bed and dressed on the mornings he felt too weak to do so himself. It was Tommy who scrubbed the floors and kept the house spotless, Tommy who did a hundred things in a day just to make his grandfather comfortable and happy, and never a single complaint, not one hint he would rather be off doing other things.

Every week, he threw all their dirty clothes into the bathtub to soak overnight, wrung them carefully out next morning then hung them over the tops of doors around the house to dry. Salt seemed to work just as well when the Food Bank had no laundry soap to give them, packets of which could be easily collected at vacant tables at Food Courts in the mal. There was plenty of food too: unfinished burgers, left over french-fries, a few sweet mouthfuls of root beer at the bottom of a plastic cup: all abandoned dregs of a privileged world which made Tommy long for the day when he was old enough to get a real job.

Witnessing children his own age whining at their parents to purchase expensive things they didn't need and gorging themselves on fast food constantly had him wondering how life would have been had the car accident never happened and his own parents were still around to spoil him silly.

It had been a foggy, quiet evening when the moment came for Tommy to be born. On their way to the hospital, however, a drunk driver had broadsided their.car at an intersection. Paramedics arriving on the scene managed to rescue Tommy from his mother's womb, but both his parents had died instantly, and Gramps, who had been driving at the time, hadn't walked a step since.

There had been much speculation about the airbag not opening properly the instant the crash had occurred - how his grandfather may not have suffered such irreparable damage to his spine which had left him paralysed from the waist down. From Mrs. Henderson, around at the time of the tragic accident, Tommy learnt that extensive head injuries had also deprived Gramps of his sense of smell and most of his memory prior to the accident. The latter, especially, bothered Tommy oftener than he cared to admit, seeing that Gramps was incapable of answering any questions regarding his parents: what their favourite colours and foods and holidays and pastimes were, where they had met, when, why they had died before he had ever had a chance to get to know them.

Sometimes, in the middle of doing his chores, Tommy found himself idling over the only picture they had of his parents taped to a cracked piece of glass inside a thin, gold frame. Gramps had always kept it on the old, scratched-up dresser beside his bed until it got knocked to the floor one morning as Tommy was helping him out of bed into his wheelchair. Now it was kept in the top dresser drawer so it wouldn't happen again.

On a few occasions Gramps heard Tommy pulling open the drawer to gaze at his parents' picture for a few moments while he dusted the bedroom furniture or wiped the floor with an old, ripped up T-shirt. He knew his grandson was full of questions he couldn't possibly answer. Many times he had examined the picture himself, trying to remember something anything about Tommy's mother and father, but most of his memory before the accident seemed lost forever. It was as if he had been born an old man, a blank slate without anything to look back upon, if that made any sense.

In spite of their hardships, Tommy never thought he was missing out on too, too much. Gramps had always been there for him. They had always lived in the same small house. What's more, he had no qualms or quandaries about living in a neighbourhood, poor as it was, where everything was close by: soup kitchens, drop-in and friendship centres, food banks and churches known to give away second-hand clothes a few Sundays per year. In fact, Tommy bet when the world's population had quadrupled and everyone in the future had to fight and struggle just to get a sip of semi-clean water, people would look back in envy at all the many blessings their predecessors, Tommy among them, had enjoyed. No, it wasn't so bad, he thought.

Once divesting himself of his schoolbooks and treasured tweed jacket in his room, Tommy headed straight for the kitchen with the butterfly magnet Penelope had given him. He magnetized it against the side of the sputtering old fridge, eyed it awhile, then pulled open the door for a peek inside. Not surprisingly, the half-loaf of plain white bread that had stared back at him when he had opened it at breakfast that morning was still huddled up by itself on the centre rack.

Tommy closed the door with a grim sigh and stared at the magnet, his hopes dented by the thought that he was just being silly. What would Gramps say, or anyone else for that matter, if he knew what he was doing? He drew from his pocket the slip of paper that had come with the magnet and reread the words aloud ("On doors small or large, where I have been stuck, three taps and a wish, may bring you good luck"), and then turned his gaze back onto the object again.

"Don't you realize how foolish this is?" the voice of reason whispered in his ear. "Nothing is in there that wasn't there before nothing! So why are you bothering? Why?"

In spite of himself, Tommy reached out and tapped the butterfly three times then closed his eyes and wished as he had never wished before. The seconds passed. He cracked open one eye - nothing seemed to be different. The same butterfy magnet was still clinging to the same fridge door, and the same chug-a-chug-a-choop-flump coming from behind it.

Slowly, his hand reached toward the handle, but just as his fingers were tightening their grip around it, just as he was preparing to yank open the door and peek inside it a second time, -

"I thought it was you I heard charging in through the front door like an out-of-control freight train," blared Tommy's grandfather, cranking his wheelchair into the kitchen from his room across the hallway. "Home for lunch already? Seems as if you hardly left a little less than two hours ago."

Tommy, almost having jumped out of his skin at Gramps's unexpected appearance, shrugged. "It's our first day back," he responded, watching his frail, spindly grandfather wheel himself up to the wobbly table recently salvaged from a refuse bin in the alleyway behind their house. "Once our textbooks get handed out and our teacher yaps her head off at us for awhile, we get to leave for the rest of the day.

He got the distinct impression his grandfather was only pretending to peruse the month-old paper spread open on the table as an excuse to linger with him in the kitchen. Perhaps, having grown accustomed to Tommy constantly being around over the summer, he had caught a bad case of Grandson-Withdrawal Syndrome during Tommy's brief hiatus to school that morning.

Tommy had been mindful of how Gramps tended to wander into the sitting-room minutes after he did to piece together a large puzzle he had laid out on a card-table by the window. Not that he found being tailed around the house particularly bothersome, Tommy secretly hoped his grandfather would eventually adjust to his not being there during the day anymore now that school had started back up.

"You needn't bother looking." Gramps advised, nodding at the fridge Tommy had been about to open. "The only loaf of bread we have on hand is still where it was the last time you checked, minus the two pieces you ate for your breakfast this morning, of course. You might as well head down to the mission to see if you can't beg a few sandwiches for your lunch, and if they don't have any to give you, we'll have to wait till seven this evening when the soup kitchen opens."

"That's hours and hours away," Tommy lamented. "Can't we just ask-?"

"Ah, ah, don't even think of tacking Mrs. Henderson's name onto the end of that thought," Gramps interrupted sternly. "We can't rely on her for our meals when putting food on her own table and paying her bills isn't always easy with what she earns cleaning restrooms at the mall part-time. There's plenty of bread in the fridge if you don't want to go to the mission, and if that isn't good enough for you, you'll have to wait till this evening."

Groaningly, Tommy swung himself round and pulled open the fridge door to get another slice of bread.

"What's wrong?" queried Gramps when his grandson let out a startled gasp and quickly slammed the door shut. Turning about, he leant back against the door, his expression deadpan and wide-eyed. "You look as if you've just seen a ghost."

"There's something in there," Tommy gibbered breathlessly.

"What do you mean?" he enquired, but Tommy just stood there matching his grandfather's baffled look with one that was unmistakably several shades paler.

Exhaling an aggravated breath, Gramps reluctantly rolled his wheelchair out from behind the table. "Out of my way," he grumbled, waving his grandson aside as he wheeled himself up to the fridge. "What is it - some silly housefly that got trapped in there now?" he snorted, reaching for the handle to pull open the door. "How many times have I told you not to keep opening it every five minutes? There's nothing in there other than what you saw the last time you-"

Gramps broke off, chiefly because a self-manufactured wail of surprise had pre-empted his words and a pair of milky grey eyes leapt up onto his age-spotted forehead as he glanced inside.

"I told you, Gramps," Tommy stuttered, taking another bewildered peek at milk and juice and yoghurt, at luncheon meats and multigrain breads, at fresh fruit and vegetables, potatoes, eggs, bacon.

"It's food!" Gramps flustered out, copying his grandson's pale, disconcerted expression. "But wherever did you get it?"

"I never brought any food home," Tommy answered defensively. "I just got home from school, remember?"

"Well, it had to come from somewhere,' Gramps responded testily. "Did you take it from the school lunchroom?"

"I didn't take anything from anywhere," countered Tommy, annoyed that his grandfather automatically assumed he had to have done something he oughtn't.

"They don't even keep this kind of food lying around at school."

"Ah-h, so you checked, did you?" Gramps observed to Tommy's chagrin as they both cast their wondering eyes back inside the fridge. "So what are we supposed to do with it all?"

Momentarily eyeing his grandfather as though he had just asked the lamest question possible, Tommy all but leapt at the hugest, plumpest, frostiest tub of yoghurt he had ever laid eyes on. "Do you think Mrs. Henderson brought it all over to surprise us?" he asked, racing to get himself a spoon from the drawer.

"Not unless she won the lottery. Here, then, what is the meaning of this outrage? How dare you consider running off with that yoghurt? That's lemon, my favourite!"

"M'm-m-m!" taunted Tommy, who, diving under the table and out the other side, gandered off down the hall with Gramps right behind him.

A HUNT FOR TREASURELY THINGS

 **CHAPTER TWO**

 **The New and Improved Tommy Brown**

LATE THAT NIGHT, as a radiant full-moon peeked in through some drab, russet curtains stapled (due to a lack of a curtain rod) onto the frame of Tommy's bedroom window, something fluttered by his pillow. Snuggled in bed dreaming he had sailed to a jungle island in search of buried treasure that pirates chasing him wanted, Tommy opened his eyes and sat up in the dark.

On the moonlit wall opposite, the enlarged shadow of something quite different from the pesky fly he thought was responsible for waking him sailed through the air in the direction of his closet door. He heard a sort of sharp click then all fell silent as before.

Throwing off a discarded, ripped-up coat that was filling in for blankets they could not afford, he flounced across the castaway mattress he had slept on since kindergarten, its rickety box-spring snap-snap-snapping as if it had osteoporosis. He switched on a tape-bandaged desk lamp at the foot of his bed, tiredly rubbed his eyes then gaped at the closet where the sound had originated.

Giving the impression a giant pitch-black witch's cap had been drawn down over the crown of his room, the weak lamplight stretched up the wall just enough to let him see that something was stuck to his closet door that had not been there before, something indistinguishable in the gloom.

Onto the faded hardwood floor he hopped, and across to the hinge-busted door he wandered, where in great perplexity he found himself staring up at the glass butterfly magnet Penelope had given him. It crossed his mind that magnets as a rule were not in the habit of adhering themselves to wood as they did to metal surfaces. Moreover, the chances were mighty slim that they were prone to sleep disorders and even slimmer that this one had flitted into his room by mistake while looking for the fridge-magnet washroom.

Positive he had seen its wings twitching in the moonshine, Tommy stepped nearer and almost jumped out of his skin when his foot brushed up against the copper spring doorstop, which growled br-r-r-roing at him very loudly. In the next room, Gramps inhaled a long, deep breath but slept on undisturbed by the din.

As was the case when he had been standing before the refrigerator in the kitchen staring at the object he had brought home from school, the same feelings of doubt willowed through Tommy's mind.

First and foremost, there was no such thing as magic. Even if there was, it was likely to find dignified lodgings within centuries-old boxes crafted of gold and graven with mysterious markings, or in pearl-handled swords studded with gems, not in some cheap adornment that was used to stick calendars and notes against the side of a refrigerator.

Secondly, there had to be a perfectly sound explanation for all that food turning up in the fridge. Either Mrs. Henderson had smuggled it into the house while he had been away at school or Gramps had decided to play a trick on him.

Thirdly, who could say that one or the other of them hadn't sneaked into his room just now while he had been sleeping and glued the magnet to his closet door? They might have, mightn't they?

Actually, the more he thought about it the less probable it seemed that they had: his grandfather was simply too stodgy and straight-laced to think of pulling such a stunt on him and Mrs. Henderson too down-to-earth. So what else was there that made any sense?

Pushing this unanswerable question aside, Tommy leant forward, tapped the object three times and promptly leapt away in alarm. A sudden wave of purplish sparks went sizzling across his closet door and a rumble of commotion issued behind it.

For many minutes he stood quivering in the dark, staring at a closet door whose busted handle appeared to have repaired itself and whose many scratches had healed over to a glossy finish. Finally creeping forward into the moonlight, and reaching toward the handle, and pulling the door ajar, Tommy stood gaping in amazement at the spectacle awaiting him inside.

Stainless steel racks of clean and colourful shirts were surrounded by shelf-panelled walls into which folded-up pants, racing-car pyjamas, socks and undergarments were neatly slotted. Saluting him along the back wall were lots and lots of loafers and running shoes and footwear of all makes and sorts. Even the rusty bottom hinge that had fallen from the frame of the door looked to have repaired itself, and the expertly-crafted walls inside smelt of moth-repellent cedar.

Mulling over whether he might be caught up in some phantasmagorias dream, a whir of wings and another sharp click drew Tommy's attention to the bedroom door against which the glass butterfly magnet quite boldly and quite without permission had decided to adhere itself. In other circumstances he might have thought it extremely rude of a magic butterfly magnet to think it had free roam of the house and could go clicking against doors and fluttering noisily about at such a late hour when people were trying to sleep. However, his fingers were fairly tingling presently at what would happen to the rest of the house if he tapped his colourfully-winged guest three times again.

Walking over and doing just that, he jumped back as electric currents wove a purple net across the door at the same time thumps and whams rumbled behind it, and the walls of his room shook and trembled as though from an earthquake.

For a long while after everything had quieted down, he stood hearkening to the din of a two-headed monster breathing outside his door, until he realized it was only his grandfather snoring blissfully away in his room, his sleep evidently undisturbed by the rumpus.

Grasping the handle at last and giving it a tug, the door slowly widened to a spellbinding sight. Plush carpeting covered the floors, the walls looked flawless and freshly painted, and every stick of furniture in the kitchen and sitting-room sparkled splendidly with newness, elegance and style.

But another sharp click was quick to draw Tommy's attention back onto the butterfly magnet, which, having repositioned itself on the other side of his bedroom door, was strenuously flapping its wings in an effort to pull it shut. This accomplished, it wiggled its little abdomen back and forth as if to signal it wanted three more taps.

Complying, Tommy pushed the door back open and inhaled a hugely surprised breath. His once torn and tattered bed had vanished. In its place rested a sleek, twelve-foot long and six-foot wide pirate's ship christened the Aurelia according to swirling daisy-white letters painted along the side of it. Rolled-up sails which could easily be untied and lowered from their riggings, perhaps to double as curtains, clung to three dark-stained masts about five to six feet tall, which ran between two single mattresses overspread in cool satiny sheets with treasure maps patterned onto them. Skull-and-crossbones pillowcases could barely contain the fluffiest, downiest pillows he had ever seen. At the stem of the ship, a half-dozen wood steps ascended to a small helm featuring a small square table engirdled by a rose-cushioned bench and a captain's wheel boasting wood spokes and a brass felly rimmed with fat pepper-shaker handles.

Scattered across Tommy's homework desk, now a great treasure-chest held up by curvaceous pawed legs, was an old captain's compass, a weathered telescope and a terrestrial globe of solid glass mounted on a metal stand. Thick sea-blue carpeting splashed across the now gleaming hardwood floor, and on the wall opposite the door were three windows instead of one, all round as portholes and framed in lacquered wood

Impatient, rascally things these magic butterfly magnets must be, for hardly had he taken the sparest glimpse at all the magical changes to his room and the house's interior than off it sailed down the hallway. Fixing itself against the front door, it fluttered its wings in a "Stop doddling and get on with it!" sort of fashion, and Tommy, creeping up to it, obliged by tapping it three times again.

Unlocking the door and tugging it open, he wandered out beneath a full-moon and gazed around him at a scene that was as astounding as it was resplendent. Dazzlingly sided in whitewashed bricks and a speckling of black ones, the house, with its windows bedecked in wood flower boxes and black-painted jalousies, was unrecognizable. Amazingly, the entire dwelling had twisted itself round to face the front of the street, squeezing the neighbouring homes on both sides of it out of the way. Also, the sitting-room window had apparently decided to shift locations and now stood beside the front door, gazing out at a yard that looked much larger than before. Golf-course green best described the state of the lawn exquisite the outdoor furniture scattered upon it. Tall cedars now bordering the property entirely concealed the house and yard from the street, and feathery soft flowers took up every inch of a now tiered rock garden spotted with laughing stone fountains.

"I must be dreaming!" Tommy decided as the little glass magnet escaped through the open door. Soaring up into the midnight sky, it exploded directly over the house into an enormous butterfly that glittered and sparkled and lit up the sky in every colour of the rainbow.

He watched the display fizzle and fade, turned to go in and stopped. In great puzzlement he turned his attention onto his bedroom window, the same question churning over and over again in his mind. Hadn't the magic butterfly magnet just transformed his room so that it now contained three round windows? So why was the same square window as before still there on the outside of the house?

Tommy shook his head and stepped back inside only to discern something else that struck him as being nonsensical as nonsensical could be. If the sitting-room window had in fact shifted up beside the front door on the outside, then why was it still in the same spot on the inside?

"Now I know I'm stuck in the middle of some crazy, idiotic dream," he muttered, scooting back down the hall to his room.

No matter how strongly he believed he had to have been dreaming or how resolutely he ignored the magical changes surrounding him as he returned to bed, the dismayed shriek that awoke Tommy next morning was as real as the pirate's ship bed he found himself still lying in. Bolting out of his room and down the hall into Gramps's, he stopped short at the sight of his grandfather huddled up in the most exquisite four-posted bed anyone could wish for.

A tumble of gauzy curtains of a begonia white fell from a heavenly canopy, and the cottony sheets out of which Tommy's grandfather's affrighted, owlish eyes were presently peeking looked as though they were pieces of clouds stitched together

"Where did that come from?" he whinnied, pointing at an elaborate and very costly entertainment unit squatting in one corner of his room. And that?" he whimpered, hocking timorous peeks at a gleaming wood drawer and cabinet set.

The butterfly magnet!" Tommy blurted out, and his eyes roamed the room in awestruck admiration before they anchored themselves on Gramps, who was now scrutinizing him carefully as if he had suddenly gone mad. It dawned on him how absurd he would sound if he attempted to elaborate on the events of the preceding night, and how futile it would be convincing Gramps that the magic magnet had been responsible. "Oh, well, um-m, I thought it might've been part of some silly dream I was having," he fribbled quickly, "unless we're both caught up in the same one. We could be dreaming, couldn't we, Gramps?

"If that's the case, Thomas, you'd best give me a bit of a punch to wake me up. Dreaming of riches isn't bound to have a poor and destitute man bounding up from his bed to face the day in chipper spirits."

"Punch you, Tommy repeated reluctanty, roaming up to the edge of the bed and sinking his hands into the butter soft blankets. "Are you sure. Gramps? I'd hate to end up giving you a black eye or something Besides, this stuff feels pretty real to me, doesn't it?"

"Thomas, please stop arguing and do as I tell you his grandfather insisted irritably. "I refuse to spend a single moment in any dream that isn't fimly embedded in reality on top of which I am particularly anxious to partake of a very strong cup of - A-ARGH! What did you do that for?"

"What's wrong with twisting your nose instead?" Tommy tittered amusedly. "It's every bit as good as punching someone, isn't it?"

Not if it's completely upside-down by the time you've finished," Gramps disagreed, rubbing his nose with an ouchful grimace. Well? What are you waiting for? I still appear to be lying here in this hideous, ridiculous looking bed and nothing's returned to normal. A solid, healthy slap, if you would, Thomas, and do try to get things right this time, won't you? Being in the winter of my years, I'm not very much inclined to-'

"What about me? Don't I get a turn?"

Gramps stared at his grandson crossly a moment then exhaled a reluctant sigh. "I suppose," he relented. "But if I'm to give you the ruddy good thumping you rightly deserve for twisting my nose, you'll need to lean a bit closer than that, I imagine. A bit closer, if you please, Thomas, yes, yes, almost - ah-h, that should do it. Hold still, then," he instructed, gearing up for a swing. But just as the flat of his hand resounded sharply against the side of Tommy's face Mrs. Henderson, having entered the house unnoticed, appeared unexpectedly at the doorway.

"Merciful stars, it isn't what you think" caterwauled Gramps over Tommy's grimace of pain and Mrs. Henderson's screech of dismay.

"Isn't it, Gramps?" accused Tommy overdramatically, folding his arms and storming indignantly from the room with his nose in the air.

"Thomas-s," Gramps intoned disapprovingly, his face crimsoning up in the scorching, judgmental look he was receiving from Mrs. Henderson. "Don't be like that, Thomas-s."

"What in tarnation is going on around here?" she demanded shrilly. "I had to walk past the house three times before I realized I wasn't seeing things. What happened? Did you win the House Renovation Sweepstakes?"

"As a matter of fact, no, we didn't," Gramps disagreed tartly. "And for your information, Amelia, we don't know where any of this came from? It was all here when we woke up."

"Phooey, I don't believe that for a blesséd second," she refuted in between irrepressible catchings of breath being directed at beautiful crown mouldings and baseboards, gold-enamelled light switches and plug casements, stippled ceilings that glittered and patches of hardwood floor that gleamed beneath thick, intricately patterned carpet.

Gramps wanted me to smack him in the jowls to make sure he wasn't dreaming," called Tommy busily from the kitchen over the sound of clinking stainless steel cupboards he was pulling open to see what was in them, "and then he smacked me, and that's when you walked in. Ho-ly man! You should see all this stuff!"

"And now that that's been cleared up," seethed Gramps cantankerously, "would someone kindly help me out of this grotesque monstrosity of a bed and into my wheelchair?"

"But how could this have possibly happened?" squawked Mrs. Henderson in a state of fuddled distraction, her eyes stapled longingly on an elegant chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

"Maybe somebody brought home a fridge magnet that does magical things when you tap it three times," Tommy offered up, breaking into a fit of loud, hysterical laughter as he clumped out of the kitchen to begin a thorough examination of their new designer bathroom.

"Amelia!" barked Gramps impatiently.

Mrs. Henderson, whose attention had been drawn meditatively to the door because of Tommy's outlandish suggestion and wild cackling, jumped as if to the sound of a cracking whip. "Yes, of course," she tweeted, flittering over to whisk back the sheik bedspread, the better to grab him by the ankles and swing him round to the edge of the bed. "You know, I wonder if it wasn't crooks who busted in while you were both asleep and left it all behind," she ruminated aloud over Tommys clamorous rifling through the bathroom cupboards, all bursting with soaps and shampoos and toiletries he never even knew existed. "Easy enough it would be for anyone to poke a hose through one of the windows and pump in sleeping gas, wouldn't it? Or who knows that they didn't just sneak in and inject you both with - I don't know - some drug they stole from a hospital?"

Mrs. Henderson leant over so Gramps could wrap his arm around her shoulder. Securing a firm grip around his waist, she hoisted him off the bed into his wheelchair then straightened herself up with an exhausted groan.

"Amelia, where's your common sense?" carped Gramps in answer to what he obviously thought was a very farfetched theory. "Sensible crooks and thieves of any calibre normally steal from people. They don't break into their homes in the middle of the night and give them things."

"Unless the police were onto them," she shrugged in her own defense. "Maybe they had to get rid of everything they stole from previous heists. And we all know how criminals are: they'll stop at nothing to do exactly what they want."

Tommy, in the meantime, had gone bounding into the sitting-room, where he was soon testing out a vibrating leather recliner that offered the most exquisite view of a chocolate-spewing fountain in the corner opposite. "Oh - my - gosh! Just look at what those rotten snakes did to the rest of the house! It's bad enough that they went and stuffed all those fancy soaps and shampoos underneath the bathroom sink, installed new marble-top counters, a brand new bathtub and the fluffiest towels l've ever seen. But what are we supposed to do with all that canned and packaged food they left in the kitchen cupboards? Do you think we ought to call the police and report them?"

Gramps and Mrs. Henderson volleyed each other worried glances.

"We could always tell them our next-door neighbour did it," proposed Tommy, heading down the hall and poking his head back into Gramps's room.

"I am your next-door neighbour, Thomas," reminded Mrs. Henderson, smiling with superficial sweetness as she wheeled Gramps across the hallway and into the kitchen.

Sausage rounds and hashed potatoes were fried up on a new stainless-steel cooker and served on glossy glass plates at a marvellous glass-topped table. All three ate in silence broken only by the gentle chugging and whistling of a glowing glass train travelling up and down some spiralling tracks on the chandelier over their heads.

It was the sort of silence in which everyone did their best to pretend that, give or take a few minor changes, everything was precisely the same as it was the day before. But it was also a silence saturated with the hope that, heck, barely a living soul on the planet hadn't risen from their beds at some point in their lives to discover that their whole world had been turned upside-down.

"Can't say as I fancy having a toy train zinging about the ceiling every time I flick on the kitchen lights," Gramps remarked, casting mesmerized glances up at the train.

"Don't be such an ornery old poop," scolded Mrs. Henderson. "I'm rather fond of it, aren't you, Thomas?" Lifting her eyeglasses up off the bridge of her nose, she threw him an apprehensive look.

"Oh, yeah, it's great," Tommy agreed, nibbling on a piece of sausage round.

It came as somewhat of a relief that Gramps and Mrs. Henderson were both handling the situation as well as he could hope. Although his grandfather was obviously unwilling to entertain the possibility that perfect strangers may have shown up out of the Blue and remodelled the house while they were asleep, one thing was crystal clear: neither he nor Mrs. Henderson would have taken Tommy's claim seriously that the butterfly magnet was responsible. And, without having seen it for themselves, who would?

Hurriedly demolishing his breakfast and placing his dishes in their new stainless steel dishwasher, Tommy went to get ready for school, leaving Gramps and Mrs. Henderson to the task of desperately racing to the cupboards to huntup two shot glasses as well as something medicinal to pour into them. There was, after all, an inground pool in the Browns' walled- and hedged-in backyard now, an octagonal gazebo with its own sleeping loft and kitchen, an outdoor brick fireplace, and absolutely no explanation as to how any of it had got there.

"I don't know how you could believe that thieves weren't behind all this," Mrs. Henderson commented while they rummaged through shelves that looked ready to buckle from the weight of canned, boxed and packaged food. "Common sense or not, what other explanation is there? None of this stuff could have walked in on its own someone had to have left it here. Aha! Never mind what you think; I don't care. Found something-ng-ng!"

Her searches had just turned up a mickey of gin and a bottle of Crème de Menthe, the last of which she suggested they pour over frosty glass bowls of vanilla ice-cream to enjoy on the expensive patio furniture nestled amongst the Browns' bloomy and exquisitely fragrant back garden.

By the time Tommy left the house for school some twenty-minutes later, she was already giggling down her fourth bowl of Crème de Menthe-spiked ice-cream and blowing raspberries on her arm Gramps believed was most unbecoming of a lady trying to set a good example for the younger generation

"What, are you jealous that I happen to be the best raspberry-blower this side of the Rockies, Shnookums?" Mrs. Henderson retorted drunkenly.

"Far from it," snorted Gramps indignantly. "Why, I am appalled to hear you actually think you can out-raspberry the best," at which point he rolled up his sleeves and the competition commenced, points going to the blower of the longest, loudest and the very grossest-sounding of raspberries.

The tall cedars that had sprung up in the overnight along the entire edge of the Brown's property had not captured much interest from the neighbours, with the exception of Mrs. Undine Salvatore across the way.

Digger, her pet Newfoundlander, having squeezed naughtily out the front door as she was leaving for work that morning, had flounced across the street to shower these deciduous newcomers with warm, neighbourly greetings. Getting swatted away by some very unfriendly branches, however, her beloved pet had scooted back across the way and into the house with his tail tucked between his legs, while Mrs. Salvatore stood there gaping in surprise at the sight of them.

Unless she had, after work the previous evening, driven up the wrong street, stumbled into the wrong house where another Newfoundlander named Digger happened to live and had slept there the entire night without realizing it, she felt positive the property she was now gazing at belonged to the Browns.

"Yesterday no trees, today many. How is this?" she quizzed herself. Many strange and unusual things she had witnessed since immigrating to Canada from the Philippines, but never this.

Positive she had partaken of two cups of very strong coffee that morning before leaving the house, certain her vision was twenty-twenty, she crossed the street to investigate. Oddly enough the cedars seemed well-established, and the soil in which they were rooted showed no signs of having been freshly churned-up as might be expected of new plantings.

Scratching her head in dismay, she endeavoured to peep between the cedars, which - now this may only have been her imagination crowded themselves together more tightly so she could not. She tried again, and again; the same thing happened, except this time one of the branches clunked her on the head. Unnerved at first, then angered, she walloped the offending tree with her carry-all, then got down on her knees to see if there were any peeping spaces closer to the ground.

Seconds later, the gate swung open and Tommy pushed his way through a narrow gap in the cedars, catching her in the act.

"Heigh, Mrs. Salvatore," he smiled friendlily through a pair of purple-tinted shades. "Did you lose something?

Already undone by some very uncooperative evergreens which obviously did not hold peeping toms in fond regard, Mrs. Salvatore shrieked when she saw him, climbed to her feet and skittered across to her vehicle in the greatest anxiety and distress. Wrenching open the door and diving inside, she lurched away up the street, tires squealing as though she had just robbed a bank, and Tommy, deciding she was probably late for work, put the incident out of his mind.

Neighbours screeching at you the very second you stumbled out of your own front yard was after all a trivial affair compared to the bright, carefree morning that lay ahead. For Tommy, all trigged to the nines in perfect-fitting jeans, the coolest of shirts and to-die for runners, it was a morning of sunny thoughts and fresh beginnings, a morning that had come romping up to his feet with all the frolicsome vigour of a playful puppy.

But it was also a morning of farewells: fond but poignant farewells to a reputation every unpopular child must wish they could be shod of with the same ease as Tommy when he stuffed his father's twilled jacket in a plastic bag and stored it up on a closet shelf.

Pupils glancing up at the new and improved Tommy Brown when he strutted into class some fifteen-minutes later could not do so without gawking in blank-faced astonishment. Even Mrs. Holmes had to look twice before it dawned on her that the unfamiliar figure swaggering by her desk to his own hadn't wandered into the wrong room by mistake. But whether she liked it or not, she had better get used to brilliant white teeth, slicked-back hair and a different smell of after shave every day or Thomas Shyler Brown was going to know the reason why.

All morning he was conscious of many eyes twisting in his direction: eyes wanting to know they hadn't been hallucinating the first, second and third time they looked; eyes stealing admiring peeks beneath bangs and pigtails; outraged eyes portraying the sentiment. "How dare you try to be one of us!"

But there was one particular set of hazel peepers which, when they first spotted him through a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, took on an expression oft seen blooming in faces just stepping out of a dim-lighted building into brilliant, warm sunshine. These, of course, belonged to someone with long, thick hair tied in two curly fountains of ruddle, someone with whom Tommy had spoken but once before.

Over the ensuing weeks, much did he ponder over the origins of the little glass butterfly Penelope had given him, and whether she had genuinely told him the truth about seeing it fall out of his pocket. He might have recovered the object in one of the refuse bins he had been searching through for empties some long-ago morning and put it in his pocket without paying much attention to it at the time, yet somehow that didn't strike him as very probable. In his searches he had disregarded oodles of glittering trinkets which, by comparison, had been able to shout, "TAKE ME WITH You" a lot louder than some inconsequential fridge magnet he had little use for. In addition, the pockets of his father's twilled jacket had buttoned flaps and were fairly deep, making it next to impossible for anything to fall out of them. What's more, Tommy routinely turned out his pockets each night and piled everything on his desk while readying himself for bed, so he would have discovered he had the object straightaway.

Autumn soon blazed lustrously across the Red River Valley in a runaway fire of orange and yellow and plum beneath candyfloss blue skies sullied by cold, dark-grey clouds shot with smoky violet plumes. Leaves dropt from the trees in crunchy drifts on lawns rapidly browning to the colour of wheat, and the sweet melodic voices of local songbirds dwindled to the sparsest twitters.

Thanksgiving came and went, and the glowing faces of carven pumpkins put out on doorsteps throughout the neighbourhood gradually disappeared in the days following Halloween. Still, the idea persisted that there was more to the quiet, unassuming figure sitting three desks up from Tommy's at school than what she was letting on - much, much more than anyone knew or suspected.

A HUNT FOR TREASURELY THINGS

 **CHAPTER THREE**

 **Zonked In By Snow**

SEVERAL FEET OF WIND-DRIVEN SNOW greeted everyone when they got up on the first Saturday in November and looked out their windows - everyone, that is, except Tommy and his grandfather.

Whatever forces had been placed in charge of distributing winter's first blast of snow across southern Manitoba seemed to have forgotten about the Brown residence altogether. Not one flake of snow had fallen anywhere on their property, and through a butterfly-shaped break in the clouds sunshine continued bleating steadily down over their little bungalow and yard as splendidly as it had throughout the summer.

Gramps, of course, stubbornly refused to look outside that morning or even leave his room. He had listened the previous evening to a local radio broadcast warning of a huge Colorado Low crossing into the keystone province from Saskatchewan in the overnight, bringing below-normal temperatures and above-average precipitation. For Manitobans in general this was merely a polite way of skirting around a four-letter word that was actually eight letters long: Blizzard.

For Gramps it meant staying locked in his bedroom and refusing to glance outside at the havoc he was certain Old Blighty had wreaked upon their beloved yard and gardens. Not one finger would he lift to push aside the layered, lambrequin curtains he had drawn across his bedroom window the night before, not even to brave the skimpiest peek at what Tommy had been vainly trying to convince him of all morning.

"Gramps, I'm telling you, there's no snow in our yard anywhere!" he called in dire exasperation after knocking on his grandfather's bedroom door for the umpety-umpth time. "The weatherman was wrong, okay, so would you just come out of there and stop being so stubborn?"

"Go away," moaned Gramps tragically from inside. "I am in mourning over the grievous loss of a dear and treasured friend. Snow means a cruel and murderous end to the most exquisite garden ever known to exist the demise of a faithful companion whose warmth and colour was never-failing. Woe is me, how can I possibly endure another wretched moment, how, when she of athousand radiant pastels, she, a friend desirous of nothing more than a smilefrom all gazers of her endless charm and beauty, hath forsaken me? End this endless torture, my Divine Angel, my transcendent Spirit of Colour, and return! Return!"

"Cripes, Gramps, would you put all that charm and beauty nonsense up on the shelf and open the frigging door already?" pleaded Tommy querulously, twisting the doorknob with all his might and main.

Gramps, after being heard loudly blowing his nose, sobbed miserably, "Be gone! Once and for all, be gone, and let a kindly old gentleman bereave the loss of the most fragrant and charismatic soul he has ever known in peace!"

In sheer frustration Tommy gave the door a spiteful kick. "Fine," he hollered, "be the stubborn old geezer you were meant to be, Gramps - see what I care! In fact, I hope you blow your nose enough times that your whole head caves in! If you want something to bawl your eyes out over, how about I just waltz into the kitchen and dump out the entire pot of coffee I just made you? Or how about I flush every last tin of ground coffee we have left straight down the frigging toilet?"

A sudden shrill shriek shook the house to its foundations. "Don't you dare!" bellowed Gramps in frantic alarm, and the door whisked open to let the fastest wheelchair on the prairies speed out of it into the kitchen.

"Tuh-duh-h!" sang Tommy, splaying his hand at the window, which provided a wonderful view of the still-intact garden, with its blooming snapdragons and balsams, its impatiens and marigolds and petunias to which Gramps had grown so fondly attached. "See, what'd I tell you? Whatever you heard about the weather on the news last night was way off base."

Had an announcement just been made that every Canadian paralysed from the waist down would soon be mailed a free, round-trip ticket to the moon, Gramps couldn't have looked more thunderstruck. Wheeling himself out through the back door, he gawked at the kidney-shaped pool glimmering in soft sunshine and surrounded by the perfectly-manicured lawn and gardens he fully expected to see withering beneath several feet of snow. Then he twisted his wheelchair about and exposed Tommy to the sort of pale, flabbergasted look that ghosts pride themselves on being able to elicit in the faces of the living.

"Great," beamed Tommy, "now that you're up and ready to lifeguard, I can go swimming. " And flinging off the towel he had draped over his neck he scampered towards the pool in a pair of swimming trunks he had changed into earlier on.

"Last one in's a rotten egg!" he cried gleesomely.

At this point, Gramps might have been expected to have sighed and called his grandson a conniving little something-or-other as he watched him diving into the glimmering water. He may well have thought the strict rule he had imposed on Tommy not to go swimming without at least one adult being present was already coming back to haunt him. But his attention was too focused on the snow blustering madly about the perimeter of their property, on the dazzling sun smiling down through that butterfly-shaped break in the clouds overhead, and on whether or not he ought to book himself a room at the nearest insane asylum.

Eventually coming to grips with the undeniable fact that things were occurring around him which Canada's highest-ranking meteorologists would be hard-pressed to explain, and that he might as well make the most of them, he put on a bright, colourful shirt, his shadiest cap and cheeriest smile. He had Tommy fetch the finest steaks he could pull from their new, fully-stocked freezer in the basement to grill on their outdoor barbecue, and to his letter best ignored the raging blizzard that seemed to think the Brown's yard was curst and should be avoided at all costs.

By noontime the temperature dipped and winds picked up to the point where it would have been dangerously unwise for anyone living in the Red River Valley to leave their homes that day. In such weather, cups of coffee thrown into the air had been known to transform into solid lumps of ice before hitting the ground, and cause exposed skin to freeze in minutes.

Leave, however, Mrs. Henderson decided she must if she was to gain any peace of mind; the two heaping garbage bags reeking of spoiled refuse in the cupboard underneath her kitchen sink simply couldn't remain there a second longer. Despite every window in her home staring out at the worst winter storm Winnipeg had not seen in more than four decades, and in total disregard of the weathercaster's advice to remain indoors, she donned her heaviest winter overalls and warmest scarf, her furriest-lined boots and gloves, and stepped outside.

Though she didn't really have far to go, the task of dragging the bags down the back steps and across her yard - now an ocean of drifting snow - quickly transpired into quite an ordeal. The frigid winds were as bitterly cold and stinging as the ice crystals whipping blindingly against her face. Midway through the now knee-deep drifts, Mrs. Henderson felt her ankles and shins stiffening from overexertion and realized she had scarcely taken ten steps.

"Almost there," she groaned perilously, trudging toward a waste container pressed against the back alleyway fence a mere ten steps ahead of her. I'm almost there."

As she was stuffing the bags into the container, her eyes happened to wander next door through a space in the cedar trees and caught a glimpse of Tommy climbing out of the pool in a pair of swimming trunks. The second time she looked (Mrs. Henderson hadn't really been paying attention the first time), she discerned Tommy leaping off the diving board into the shimmering pool with a gleeful shout. Looking almost as if he might have been sporting a bit of a tan, his head bobbed to the surface and, with a merry wave, he hollered, "Nice day for a swim, isn't it, Mrs. Henderson?"

Mrs. Henderson could hardly believe what her own two eyes were telling her: that the Brown's entire yard looked as deliciously warm as a sunny afternoon in mid-July. Apple blossoms weighted down the branches of trees lining both sides of the inground pool. Honeybees drifted lazily between swirls of pearl and purple and sprays of lemon and orange flowers in the fountain-littered gardens, while Gramps was keeping a watchful eye on steaks sizzling on the outdoor grill. A bushy-tailed squirrel gazed at her curiously on the greenest lawn she had ever seen as it partook of an unshelled peanut.

In a delirious tizzy Mrs. Henderson ploughed her way up the side of her house and out of her yard through rolling snowdrifts polar bears in the Canadian Arctic would have better appreciated. Down the sidewalk she flew and through the tall cedars enshrouding the Brown's small front gate she went, her face already numbed by the wind-driven snow, her toes and fingers feeling the first prickles of frostbite. Squeezing herself into the yard, she stopped dead in her tracks. There was no snow anywhere, not a fleck, and not a breath of cold. Everything looked just as it had through the summer, and the little butterfly-shaped patch of sky above it was as invitingly blue as could be.

"Care for a fresh-picked banana?" offered Gramps the second she clomped into the backyard with the cumbersome gait of a space-suited moonwalker in her winter garments.

Bananal" she bellowed incredulously. "What in the ruddy B. Jesus is going on around here? We're smack dab in the middle of the worst blizzard we've seen in forty years and here you two are grilling steaks in the backyard and - and swimming!"

"You're welcome to join us, Mrs. Henderson," invited Tommy. clambering out of the pool and skipping towards the diving board. "Isn't she, Gramps?"

"Actually," his grandfather smiled over the tumultuous splash of Tommy flumping feet first into the pool again, "it would be ineffably rude of you to refusewhen we've seen neither hide nor hair of you in a fair number of weeks. Well, Amelia? Do you plan to idle the entire day away in that abysmal looking penguin's outfit?"

"Come on in, Mrs. Henderson, the water's great!" Tommy beckoned as his head bobbed to the surface and he swam to the side.

"Silly of me, wasn't it, for not thinking I'd need to bring along a bathing suit as I was stepping out into minus thirty degree Celsius weather?" she parleyed quite sarcastically.

"There, there, Amelia, you needn't fret," brayed Gramps in a placating tone. "Whatever's going on is as much a mystery to us as it must be to you. However, I, for one, intend to take full advantage of it while it lasts."

Mrs. Henderson slowly did off with her outdoor things, her gaze fixated on the squirrel she had seen earlier as it picked up another unshelled nut from a pile Tommy had left for it, all the while regarding her curiously. Stuffing her gloves and scarf into the arms of her parka, which she then draped over a garden-chair, whose sun-warmed cushions were almost scalding to the touch, she wiggled out of her boots and wandered across the soft, velvety lawn to check the steaks sizzling on the grill. Enroute, her eyes darted about the yard as if she was roaming through a haunted house at midnight, and when a bottleneck fly buzzed past her ear, she uttered a kind of shriek that had her throwing an apprehensive look at Gramps, who politely glanced away.

"Whew, it really is a shame we don't have air conditioning, isn't it?" bemoaned Tommy, springing out of the pool and plucking up off the lawn the towel he had thrown there earlier.

"Wh-what do you mean?" questioned Amelia, completely baffled.

"Who can sleep when it gets so hot at night, even with all of the windows open? he answered, drying his face and hair.

Mrs. Henderson, who distinctly recalled getting up the preceding night to turn on the heat full blast and throw another comforter across her bed to keep warm, gawped at him in stone-faced silence.

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Gramps informed Tommy. "Bradley McBiggins just phoned and asked if he could come over.

Tommy's ears perked in surprise. "He did? What did you say to him?" he asked. A heightened sense of anxiety overtook his expression, chiefly because this would be the first time in recorded history that Bradley had ever paid a visit to Tommy's home. It was true Bradley no longer acted ashamed to be seen in his company ever since Tommy had stopped wearing his father's tweed jacket, true their friendship had strengthened in recent weeks, but Bradley McBiggins actually stopping by of his own accord definitely qualified as a Red Letter Day.

"I told him I didn't think you'd mind," Gramps responded.

"In this weather?" balked Mrs. Henderson. "What were you thinking?"

"That's okay, Mrs. Henderson," Tommy reassured her. "He just lives down the street, and next to me Bradley's about the toughest kid I know. In fact, to my way of thinking, he shouldn't have any problems getting here compared to some fat old cow whose legs rub together so much she could probably start a fire just running across her front lawn."

Mrs. Henderson gasped.

"Oh, well, I didn't mean to imply that you were a fat old cow who could start a fire just by running across your front lawn, Mrs. Henderson," Tommy spluttered in horror.

"Perhaps it would be best if you went in and waited for Bradley at the front door," Gramps advised smilingly. "I don't imagine you'll be able to hear him knocking all the way out here in the backyard. Oh, and take Mrs. Henderson's things with you and hang them up in the front closet - neatly, if you please, Thomas, and carefully, seeing as they're not yours and we haven't the means to replace them if they get damaged."

Feeling he had just succeeded in getting his name permanently stricken from Mrs. Henderson's Christmas List, Tommy was only too happy to oblige Gramps's instructions. Waiting for Bradley to arrive happily didn't take at all long. In themidst of hanging up Mrs. Henderson's winter garments a knock came at the door and Tommy opened it to the sight of Bradley quivering uncontrollably in a beige, down-stuffed parka, some navy-blue, wind-resistant mittens and a set of oversized, suede moccasins.

By the looks of him, you'd have thought he had just walked all the way from lqaluit to Churchill rather than having covered a distance of roughly ten or so houses down the street from Tommy's. Half-hidden behind a woollen black scarf, eyebrows white with frost, his face looked redder than a Delicious Apple fresh from the Okanogan Valley and was enframed by icicles tangled up in his parka's fur-lined hood. Smouldering wisps surrounded him in an aura of cold that almost had Tommy shivering himself.

"Would you mind telling me why there's no snow in your yard?" came his familiar but troubled voice from behind a nose- and mouth-shaped patch of frost stamped on his scarf. "And what's with all these fake flowers and plants and stuff?" he added, inspecting the gardens in the front yard. "They are fake, aren't they?" This last question he directed at Tommy just as several apple blossoms decided they wanted to dirift down in front of his eyes from some branches embowering the entranceway. Bradley watched them flutter to the ground then glanced enquiringly at someone he knew was not normally as fidgety and tense as he presently seemed.

"It's possible,' Tommy stammered, acutely aware that the garden fountains seemed to be trickling a whole lot louder than before and wafts of super-concentrated fragrance were drifting their way from some annoyingly healthy rosebushes. "Did you want to come in?" he offered, seizing Bradley by the hood and heaving him anxiously across the threshold with practically enough strength to fling two sacks of potatoes into the back of a farmer's truck in one shot.

"Sure, if you insist," Bradley replied, despite stumbling clumsily up against the closet door. Turning and tilting his head back to catch a better glimpse of his surroundings beneath the low-hanging hood of his parka, he exclaimed, "Far out! This is the coolest place I've ever been in!"

His winter duds were hurriedly shedin a heap on the broadloom floor before he fumbled to unlace and kick off his snow-encrusted moccasins, all the while ogling the chocolate fountain gurgling in beckoning spurts on the opposite side of the sitting-room.

"I always thought you guys were dirt-poor, but this is way nicer than even Ernie Flackbart's place," he remarked. "I got to have a look inside it when me and Minnie went shelling out for treats this Halloween. His mom let us come in and stand in the front hall while she went to get us some Candy Apples she made herself. Do you know his dad's an accountant? They even have a pool in their backyard."

"Have you seen ours yet?" asked Tommy grinningly.

Bradley stood up, looking elf-struck. "Yours? W-what do you mean?"

"Come on, I'll show you."

Tommy gallivanted down the hall into the kitchen. Crossing to the back door, he glanced behind him and realized Bradley was nowhere to be seen. "Heigh, where'd you go?" he called.

Footsteps rumbled up the hallway seconds later, and into the kitchen Bradley bounded wiping chocolate from the corner of his mouth. "Nowhere really," he asserted guiltily, or began to, until he did a sudden double-take at the miniature glass train-set whistling gently above the kitchen table. "Holy kamoly! What's that?" he cried, stopping dead in his tracks.

"Oh, nothing." Tommy smirked, much too eager to see Bradley's reaction at the sight of their backyard. Striding over to the back door and throwing it open he stood aside to give Bradley a clear view of the pool and gardens.

Anyone walking in right at that moment could have easily mistaken Bradley for a statue that belonged in a wax museum. Gaping stock still at the inviting plunge of coral blue water hemmed in by bloomy apple trees, he slowly stepped outside, mouth agape, then whirled round to face Tommy.

"No way!" he howled out. "You-u have an inground pool? And all this time I thought Ernie had it made. The one at his house is above-ground, but this one is oodles better!"

Something struck Bradley queerly all of a sudden as he surveyed the yard, and a deeply perturbed look washed his belated grin away. "Heigh, I thought everyone's gardens shrivelled up weeks ago" he maundered, searching Tommy's face wonderingly. "And - I mean - well - there was tons of snow in everyone else's yard when I walked over here. Why doesn't yours have any?"

Tommy shirked his shoulders. "Just lucky, I guess. Do you want to go swimming? The sun's still out so I don't think Gramps would mind."

Busy transferring two sizzling steaks from the grill onto a gleaming platter he was about to convey to a nearby garden table, Gramps waved at Bradley from across the yard. Huddled beneath a leafy arbour of banana trees, the table had been tastefully set for himself and Mrs. Henderson, already seated in eager readiness of doing considerable damage to one of the steaks.

Bradley lifted his gaze upward at the sky and scratched his head. "The sun's still out?" he repeated as if this was even odder than discovering the Brown's yard was entirely snow-free. "But thought it was just starting to get dark out when I left the house, and- Heigh-gh, what's going on around here? My mom told me there was a blizzard warning in effect when I told her I was coming over to your place. She even heard on the news it was supposed to be dipping way down into the minus thirties today, and wasn't sure if she should even let me leave the house."

"I never listen to the news so I wouldn't know," Tommy replied hastily. "Anyhow, I think there might be some towels and an extra swim suit in the gazebo over there. In the meantime..." With a whoop and a holler, he left Bradley standing there in a state of blither and bother, pelted across the lawn and catapulted out into the centre of the pool.

The mysterious weather anomalies wimbling about the Brown residence were soon forgotten, and Bradley spent a delicious few hours practicing his dives with Tommy, until Gramps let it be known a quick snack awaited their presence at the kitchen table. After drying themselves off and enduing their clothes in the gazebo, they skipped across the lawn and into the kitchen to a feast of steaks and jacket potatoes and all the trimmings.

"Your grandfather sure went to an awful lot of trouble just for us," Bradley beamed in delighted surprise as he sidled up to the table and reached toward a breadbasket of steaming rolls.

"That's Gramps for you," Tommy shrugged, selecting a fat juicy steak from a platter in front of him and diving at it with his knife and fork. "We don't usually get a lot of people visiting us, so I'm sure he wants to make a good impression."

"I don't think you ever told me what his real name is, did you?" Bradley asked.

"Just Gramps, I guess," Tommy replied, popping a wedge of steak into his mouth.

The roll, which Bradley was in the process of buttering, almost dropped from his hand. "What? You don't even know?"

Tommy shrugged. "That's what everyone calls him, even Mrs. Henderson," he responded.

"Don't think he remembers what his real name is himself, seeing how the accident took away most of his memory.

"Hah! He probably has a name that's so weird you don't want to tell me what it is because you're afraid I'll go spreading it around at school."

"Oh-h, sure, Bradley, sure, I get it. You mean a name such as, h'mmm, Bradley Jesumpfrew McBiggins?"

Bradley winced visibly. Hearing his middle name spoken out loud made him cringe, but Tommy wasn't about to tell anyone, having already paid dearly to find out what it was in the first place: mowing the McBigginses front and back lawns, not to mention completing an entire Saturday's worth of Bradley's chores.

"You didn't tell anyone that that's what my middle name is, did you?" he jittered nervously.

Tommy sighed and rolled his eyes. "I think you'd know already just by the amount of people who'd have been teasing you about it by now," he answered. "Just like I think I should know what my own grandfather can and can't do, okay? He can't remember anything, not his name or where he was born or even what city he grew up in."

"Somewhere in England, I bet, Bradley conjectured, taking a bite of his roll then setting it butter-side down on his plate by accident.

"Pfff! Don't you know which side your bread is buttered on?" snorted Tommy, spurring a surprised titter from Bradley as he turned the roll right-side up again.

"I don't see why you think it's so strange that Gramps can't remember anything about our family when your parents won't even tell you if you have aunts or uncles or cousins or anything."

Bradley lowered his eyes onto his plate. "Want to know something?" he asked after a contemplative moment.

"What?"

"I found this old scrapbook upstairs in my mom's closet when she was out shopping last week. There were all these old newspaper clippings about a twin brother and sister who got kidnapped from some hospital just after they were born."

"Why would your mom keep something like that lying around the house?"

Bradley shrugged. "Who knows? They never tell me or Minnie anything."

"Well, it wouldn't be you or Minnie who got kidnapped because you're older than she is, aren't you?"

"By ten months."

"And it couldn't be me because I don't even have a twin sister. Did you ask your mom about it?"

"Not even," Bradley replied, taking a sip of milk. "She'd know right away that I'd been snooping.

"Heigh, have you seen that creepy kid that goes to our school?" he enquired, changing the subject.

Tommy skewered Bradley with an impatient glance. "In case you haven't noticed, our school is full of creepy kids. Which one do you mean: Barry Wilcox, Gilroy Madison, that kid with the jean-jacket who spits everywhere and never brushes his teeth-?"

"The new one," Bradley cut in. "His name's Jessop Punchworthy. You can't miss him. He's way taller than anyone else and tough as nails from what I heard. They put him in Mrs. Briggs's fifth-grade class when he showed up sometime last week. Heard he got expelled from three different schools and he's already failed twice."

"Twice? H'mmm, not very clever, is he?"

"My sister knows somebody in his class, and she says it looks as if he isn't going to pass this year either. He's always lipping off the teacher and can't even read hardly. Ernie told me he's seen him chumming around with Barry Wilson and Gilroy Madison, and Brantley says he's been cornering kids in the hallway and threatening to punch their lights out if they don't hand over their lunch money to him."

That's all we need," Tommy droned. "Another gorilla somebody let out of the zoo to make everyone else's life miserable."

After inhaling their meals in less than twenty-minutes, Tommy took Bradley on a guided tour of the house. First up on the itinerary was Gramps's room, followed by a brief stint to the chocolate fountain in the sitting-room. Next up was the bathroom and a second trip to the chocolate fountain in the sitting-room, and last but not least, a tour of the now fully-finished basement ending with - you guessed it - an unscheduled stop at the chocolate fountain in the sitting-room.

The instant they set foot inside Tommys room and were standing in front of the Aurelia, one proudly, one flabbergasted, Bradley couldn't wait to hop up to the captain's helm and dive down onto the mattresses. Later, he went bounding into the closet when he pulled open the door and discovered it clogged with brand new shirts and pants and shoes.

"Look at these!" he purled out in surprise after spending several minutes rummaging through the floor to ceiling shelves stocked with board-games and books and puzzles and whatnots along the back wall of the closet.

"What are they?" Tommy enquired as he watched his friend pull out two wood skeletons doubling as hangers for silken white, frilly-collared shirts as well as some thinly-striped gold and beige parachute pants with matching waistcoats that had floppy, bucktooth coattails. Big beige caps stitched onto periwigs of long grey ringlets were also tied to the necks of each hanger.

"Pirate costumes!" peeled Bradley, clearly impressed by the set of wishbone buttons running up and down the fronts of each waistcoat and by the skull-and-crossbones insignias fronting the brims of each cap. "I found them hanging on some wall hooks in the corner behind all the clothes. Too bad you didn't tell me about them before Halloween last week; we could've gone out as buccaneers instead of the same old skeleton outfit my mom made me three years ago."

"I didn't even know I had them," Tommy stated just as something clanged to the floor while Bradley was handing him one of the costumes. They both looked down at a pearl-hilted sword studded with small glass rubies and emeralds.

"Awesome possum!" Bradley belted out, eagerly searching the inside of his waistcoat to see if his costume had its own sword too, which, he was ecstatic to find, did.

Tommy picked up the fallen sword and removed it from the scabbard. "We'd better put these swords back in the closet where we found them," he advised, scrutinizing the curved silver blade in whose gleaming reflection Tommy's own perturbed features stared back at him. "They're pretty sharp and could probably hurt someone if we started swinging them around."

More interested in strapping on an eye patch he had just discovered in one of the pockets, Bradley handed over his sword to Tommy, who leant them both against the wall in the back corner of the closet.

"Let's try on these costumes to see if they fit," suggested Black Patch McBiggins, and moments later they were both having themselves a good laugh at how each of them looked in the garments, which, give or take a few minor adjustments, seemed tailor made just for them.

"Okay, so let me see if I've got this straight, Bradley articulated in a rather confused and disbelieving tone after Tommy had finished telling him the entire story concerning the magic butterfly magnet. By this time, they were both ensconced cross-legged on one of the Aurelia's silk-sheeted mattresses, Bradley toying idly with the golden compass and telescope he had confiscated from the treasure-box desk, Tommy twirling the terrestrial globe now cradled on his lap.

"You mean to tell me that all of this everything on this entire property, including the pool we just went swimming in was conjured up by an itty-bitty fridge magnet Penelope Winston gave you?"

"I know it's hard to believe, but I swear on my great grandmother's grave that I'm not making anything up," Tommy replied, maintaining a steady gaze on the clear, glass-etched surface of the globe. Knowing how absurd the story must have sounded, there was a hint of nervousness in his voice he could not quite control or conceal. "It's all true, every single-"

"Whoa, hold your horses," Bradley interrupted. "Did I say I thought you were stringing me a line? Did I give you any reason to think I didn't believe you?"

Tommy raised his head and gazed at him in mingled confusion and surprise.

"N-no, but why would you?"

"For the simple reason that it was Penelope who gave it to you in the first place," he declared as if the mere mention of her name was sufficient to explain the most baffling mysteries of the universe. "Question is, why, out of all the people in our entire school, did she decide to give it to you?"

"Sure beats the heck out of me," Tommy shrugged. "Before she came up to me at recess that day, I'd never even spoken to her not even once."

"Funny," Bradley decided after considering the matter a thoughtful moment. "You'd think she'd have given it away to someone she knew better, such as a friend or a neighbour. Still, that's Penelope Winston for you: nothing adds up to a bit of sense whenever she's around, I'm finding."

Tommy regarded him a puzzled moment. "What do you mean?"

Bradley exhaled an incredulous sigh and rolled his eyes. "She's been sitting three desks in front of you in class for, what, a month and a half now, and you mean to tell me you haven't observed anything funny going on?" he warbled, throwing up his hands. "Everyone's been talking about how the end-of-day buzzer goes off fifteen early sometimes right after she snaps her fingers, and how she once made the clock above the blackboard move ahead one hour just by swirling her finger at it. Emie Flackbart's been keeping his eye on her ever since he noticed it the first time. He says she's got some kind of golden sunflower on this chain around her neck that she taps with her finger whenever something bizarre happens. Remember that surprise quiz Mrs. Holmes was about to give us just before the fire alarm sounded and the whole thing had to be postponed until the next day?"

"Yeah, what about it?" "Right before it went off, Ernie says he saw Penelope tap that charm around her neck and funny blue light curled straight out the palm of her right hand. He's certain he's the only one who noticed it because it all happened so fast. But I'm telling you: Penelope and the word Bizarre go together the way two peas in a pod do. Honestly, I can't count the number of strange things that have been happening around our house ever since my sister became friends with her."

"Like what?"

"Hoo, don't even get me started," Bradley warned, adjusting his eye patch. I could write a book on everything that's been going on at our house lately."

"Come on, it's not as if you need to fill me in on every single detail - just one or two things."

All right, listen up," ceded Bradley, leaning forward and lowering his voice to a bare whisper as if he didn't want even the walls to overhear what he was about to reveal. "The first time she came over, I went wandering past Minnie's room on my way to the washroom, positive I heard them both in there giggling and yapping their heads off. But as soon as I got up to the washroom door Minnie came stumbling out of the hallway closet right across from it and practically bowled me over. Next thing I know, there's Penelope waltzing out of the washroom right in front of me, telling Minnie that she needed to concentrate a lot harder on whatever it was they were doing. Well, yeah, I told her, 'like remembering where the correct door to the washroom is and learning how to watch where you're going.' Of course, they both made faces at me as I headed into the washroom and slammed the door on them, but it sure seemed odd, don't you think?"

"M'mm, I don't know, Bradley," Tommy breathed doubtfully. "l mean, you could've just imagined hearing them both in Minnie's bedroom when it might've been that they were down at the other end of the hall all along, couldn't you have - or could you not have or whatever?"

"What?" Bradley cried in outrage. "Are you suggesting that I may have been imagining things? That's the same as you trying to convince me not to believe your story about Penelope giving you that magnet, isn't it?"

"Oh, is it? Never mind, then," Tommy backtracked swiftly. "I believe you."

"Look, it wasn't coincidence, okay? And I wasn't imagining things either, Bradley ranted. "I've walked past Minnie's room enough times to know how it sounds when she's in there with one of her friends."

"Excuse me, but didn't I just say, 'I believe you'?" Tommy stated, sounding slightly exasperated. "You don't have to get all wound up over nothing."

"I'm not wound up," cried Bradley defensively. "Why are you putting words in my mouth?"

I am not - repeat not - putting words in your mouth, so would you please get on with what you were going to tell me?"

"Okay, okay," Bradley relented, sighing in a manner that seemed to indicate he wished arguing and splitting hairs could be outlawed altogether. "So anyway, last Saturday as you know was Minnie's birthday-"

"It was? I didn't know that. Wasn't last Saturday Halloween?"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, so Penelope gave her this old broom that was all wrapt up in cellophane with a big red ribbon on it and a bristling black cat that was actually a card with all these-"

"Look, I really don't care what the broom was wrapt in or any of that kind of stuff, all right? Just get on with it."

"Do you want to hear the whole story or are you going to keep interrupting me every two seconds to tell me what you don't want to hear? The point I was trying to make was that it may have looked as if it had come gift-wrapt from a department store, but that broom was fit for the garbage as far as was concerned. Besides, you sure wouldn't find me dancing for joy the way Minnie did if that's what someone decided to give me for my birthday.

"Anyhow, they were up in Minnie's room when I went to call them for supper - Mom made this triple layer fudge cake dripping with chocolate whipped-cream and couldn't wait to get at it. I heard them laughing their heads off in there, so I threw open the door and-" Bradley stopped and threw Tommy a very tentative look. "I'd better not tell you," he enunciated cautiously. "You won't believe me - I just know it."

"Believe what? Come on, how do you even know I won't believe you if you don't tell me what it is?"

Bradley inhaled a deep breath. All right, here goes: Minnie was flying around the room on that broom Penelope gave her."

A stunned silence ensued, the kind of silence that has a way of amplifying the slightest sniffs and shuffles of movement. Suddenly tossing back his head Tommy unleashed a loud and highly obnoxious bellow of laughter at the ceiling, laughter that goads and mauls, laughter that nobody could possibly appreciate after divulging secrets they consider of a delicate and sensitive nature. "You're right, I don't believe you," he jiggled out insensitively between breath-robbing shakes and spasms. "Ohh, that's the funniest load of cow paddies I've ever heard!"

"Then why'd you insist I tell you in the first place? Bradley exploded resentfully. "You believed what I told you about that other stuff, or was that a lie, too, so you could make me out to be some kind of moron you can laugh at while I grovel in shame? Some friend you're turning out to be!"

"Fine, fine, okay, I believe you-woo! You mean to say Minnie was flying around her room on the broom Penelope gave her for her birthday? Oh-h - my - gosh! Somebody get me some water; I think I feel a little-

"Would you just settle down already? I'm telling you, that's what I saw. I also caught them chucking their schoolbooks into the air and watched them fly around the room the same as boomerangs. There they were, no lies, zooming around in circles then flying straight back into their hands."

"Get the smelling salts now, somebody quick, the smelling salts before I collapse!" roared Tommy in undisguised amusement as Bradley frowninghy picked up the telescope and bopped him on the knee with it.

If they hadn't expected to hear a metallic click as it impacted against Tommy's knee, they certainly weren't anticipating the eyepiece to go springing from the end of it and thwacking Tommy in the forehead.

"Ow-w, what'd you do?" he puled, pressing his hand against a white mark the eyepiece had made just above his right eye. "Great, thanks for breaking it!" he hissed acidly, and picking up the dislodged eyepiece he held it incriminatingly up in front of Bradley's nose.

"I never broke it," the latter insisted. He grabbed the eyepiece and screwed it back down over the mouth of the telescope, or tried to, but something lodged inside it was preventing him from securing it entirely. Unscrewing the eyepiece again, he squinted into the dark space within. "Heigh, what's this?" he nickered, and slipping his fingers into the space he removed a tightly rolled up gunny cloth from inside the telescope. Roughly a foot in length, the material was thin but inflated to nearly double its size as he was pulling it out. "I sure don't see how we were able to see through this telescope with this thing stuck inside it," Bradley noted, peeking into the barrel of the telescope. "Do you?"

Tommy felt about as brimful of answers on that one as a half-cooked mashed potato. "Here, bring it over to the desk where there's more room," he suggested.

They jumped off the bed, laid the gunny cloth down and carefully unfurled it across the treasure-desk's gleaming wood surface. "What are those things?"

Tommy asked, gazing at four sharp wooden objects which appear to have been rolled up inside it.

Bradley held one up. "Old wall pegs, maybe, for hanging things up on? I don't know."

"Let's put it on the floor where there's more room to unfold the rest of it Tommy recommended, noting that the gunny cloth had also been folded up into a massive fan. On the blue carpet in front of the bed, they carefully unfolded the cloth until they were at last staring down at the painting of an expansive ocean rippling with silvery waves and surmounted by a dandelion sun nestled in misty azure.

"Bor-r-ring," was Bradley's appraisal of it. "I mean, it's an ocean someone decided to paint on a crinkly old cloth and nothing else. Why would anyone even bother? And look at how huge it is."

Why don't we hang it up over there so we can get a better look at it?" Tommy proposed, already dragging a chair across to a vacant spot on the wall beside the door. Snagging a corner of the picture, he hopped up onto the chair and waited for Bradley to hand him one of the pegs from the desk. "They kind of remind me of little cannons with tiny swords poking out the bottom," Tommy commented, examining the object briefly.

Positioning the peg over a corner of the picture, he jammed it through the cloth and into the wall, then shuffled his chair over to the opposite side and repeated the same action with another peg. Just as he was securing a third peg into the bottom corner, a smart rap was heard at the door and Mrs. Henderson poked her head into the room.

Bradley couldn't help but stare at her, and neither could Tommy. Her hair was tucked up into a beige, white polka-dotted bandana and she was clad in the same sort of buccaneering outfit as Tommy and Bradley, minus the skull-and-crossbones cap.

"What are you wearing?" balked Tommy, trading a surprised glance with Bradley before they both broke into disbelieving giggles.

"Nothing much different from what the two of you have on," she bristled defensively. "Heh! Don't you think I look slim and svelte in my new ensemble?"

It was tucked away in a corner of your grandfather's closet and I thought I'd put it on to see what you thought."

Tommy and Bradley's joviality intensified immeasurably when she swept further into the room as though she was Montreal's most highly-sought after fashion model. But it was the ridiculous twirl she attempted that had them stumbling around in a dither of unrestrained chuckles.

"Would one of you mind explaining to me what it is you think is so funny?" she demanded, her expression capsizing into a haughty frown. However, the only answer she was to receive were more side-splitting giggles. "Hmph!" she snorted in contempt. "If you must know, I really came in to tell you that it looks as though we're stranded here for the next little while."

Their laughter abruptly halted. For several seconds, Bradley and Tommy goggled each other the way any mariner might have done had a giant octopus climbed up over the side of their boat and slapped them with its tentacle

"What?" they both chimed at the same time.

"We're completely zonked in," Mrs. Henderson explained. "I can't even get through the front gate. The blizzard's blown a ten-foot high snowdrift right up against those cedar trees surrounding the yard. But there's no need to panic or anything; I just phoned Bradley's mother and told her you're quite welcome to bunk up with Tommy overnight until the snowploughs can dig us all out. Lord only knows how long that will take - at least a few days, I expect.

"Goodness me, what's this you're hanging up, Thomas?"

"Some ugly picture we pulled out of that old telescope," he replied. "There wasn't enough room to lay it out on the floor, so we were just hanging it up to see how it looked."

"So, what're you waiting for?" she smiled eagerly. "Is this some sort of top secret mission? Perhaps we should close the door so your grandfather won't catch wind of what we're doing," she whispered, causing Tommy to roll his eyes to the ceiling.

Pulling the cloth-painting tight, he positioned the final peg over the last remaining corner of it, pushed it into the wall, and instantly wished he hadn't.

Brilliant white light flashed blindingly from inside it and water - lots of water - came pouring out of the picture onto the floor.

Mrs. Henderson let out a horrified scream and got swept off her feet in the torrent before managing to pull herself up beside Tommy and Bradley, who had both bounded up onto the Aurelia and stood flinching at each other's sopping wet clothes and hair and disbelieving faces. In seconds, several feet of water had spilled into the room from an ocean painting that seemed to have magically come alive.

"What did you do?" she shrieked at Tommy as she fought to hang tightly on to the mainmast. "Where is all the water coming from? Did you break a pipe in the wall or something?"

"I didn't do anything," Tommy answered her, annoyed she had automatically assumed he had done something he oughtn't have. "1 think it's coming from that picture!"

Aghast and bewildered, Mrs. Henderson twisted round to determine the source of the deluge for herself, but, as luck would have it, the Aurelia lurched unexpectedly forward, bumped into the treasure-chest desk and sent it toppling onto its side. At the same time she lost her footing and landed on the mattress with a thump, the force of which caused the Aurelia to tip sidewise on a dangerous angle, and Tommy and Bradley to tighten their grips on the foremast beside her.

Grabbing onto the mainmast, feet flailing over the edge of the deck, Mrs. Henderson took the brunt of several fast-moving waves flouncing in through the picture. Then, in the rapidly rising water that was filling the room, the Aurelia floated up off the floor, pivoted out from the wall and jounced across the room.

Pulling herself up onto the deck, Mrs. Henderson peered behind her just in time to witness a huge breaker sweeping into the room. The Aurelia nosed sharply down, its keel scraping against the floor from the surge as it rumbled overtop of them, struck the opposing wall then rolled back the other way. Slamming into the stern of their ship it swept them straight into the painting and a set of very imperilled circumstances that neither Tommy nor Bradley nor Mrs. Henderson could have possibly foreseen.

 **A HUNT FOR TREASURELY THINGS**

 **CHAPTER FOUR**

 **A Stowaway on Board**

CERTAIN THEIR LIVES were destined to become books only half-witten, Tommy ciung to the Aurelia's foremast in frightened wonder of what had happened and where they had gone. His eyes smarted in the brilliant sunshine that deflected off the frothy-tipped waves churning around them, while he and Bradley listened to Mrs. Henderson giving a screechy recital of the Lord's Prayer, her arms gripping the mainmast anaconda-style, her eyes clenched tightly shut.

Astern of a vessel that was supposed to be a bed and presumably unfit for ocean travel, the rectangular-shaped aperture through which they had just passed slowly diminished in size as they drifted further from it. Hanging half-in and half-out of the water, it called to mind a rip Tommy had suffered in the knee of his old jeans, a tear in the faded blue fabric of sea and silken sky that definitely did not belong. Rocket science was not necessary to figure out they needed to swing the ship round and steer it back to that little shrinking piece of his room engorged with water from an ocean that had no business springing out of a wall hanging in the first place. Still, what could be done? Great swells kept battering the side of the ship and spraying up against them, and Tommy wasn't about to risk getting washed overboard by rushing up into the helm to try turning them about when he, himself, could barely ride a bicycle.

"What if we lose sight of it?" Bradley sputtered worriedly, seawater trickling down his forehead and into his eyes from the drenched curls of his periwig. "What if we get lost out here and can't find our way back?"

"Thumb a ride back on the next seagull? I don't know, Bradley," Tommy replied miserably. "Why ask me questions you know I can't answer?"

"Something tells me I should have listened to my mom and stayed home," griped Bradley. "l can't believe I actually fought my way to your place through a raging snowstorm only to end up getting cast adrift in the middle of some ocean."

"Well, don't go blaming me; it's Minnie's fault we're even here, not mine," Tommy mumbled, spitting out her name as though he had just taken a sip of out of-date buttermilk gone lumpy.

Bradley ogled him in wondering surprise. "You mean to tell me you blame my sister for us being stuck out here in the middle of Nowhere Ocean? How do you figure that?"

"What, are you totally blind or something? If she hadn't become friends with Penelope to start with, none of those strange things you said you noticed going on at your house would've happened. You wouldn't have told me about them, l wouldn't have laughed at you, and you wouldn't have flown off the handle and clunked me on the knee with that telescope. The lens wouldn't have fallen off and we'd never have found that picture stuffed inside it."

"What about Penelope?" suggested Bradley. "She's the one who gave you.that magic butterfly thingamajig that started this whole thing, wasn't she?"

"Read my lips, Bradley, it is not Penelope's fault, I don't care what you say." Tommy insisted stubbornly. "It's Minnie's the facts speak for themselves."

"Pff! You're just saying that because you can't stand her."

"Who the heck can? The only time she ever speaks to me is when she has something nasty to say, like 'Ooooh! Look what I got for Christmas, what'd you get, loser?' She whispers in her friends' ears whenever I walk by, she's rude whenever I come to call on you and she never shuts her yap long enough for anyone to get a word in edgewise, not that she has anything worthwhile to say anyway. Face it, Bradley: it's in the name: Minnie brain, Minnie personality. Just be thankful you didn't turn out to be the same way she is, otherwise you'd have a lot fewer friends than you do now."

A sullen frown draped itself across Bradley's expression that seemed to say, "that's my sister you're talking about," yet he politely kept his thoughts under lock and key, and said nothing, even when Tommy asked:

"Why are you looking at me like that for? She's not even nice to you by the sounds of it."

The frown lingered long over the next while in which neither of them spoke, Tommy standing with his head leaning against one side of the mast gazing leeboard, Bradley with his head against the opposite side gazing larboard. By the time their clothes had almost dried in the mid-afternoon sun, the waves had calmed themselves down into quivering ripples of silver and the rocking of the ship had relaxed considerably.

When it suddenly occurred to her that neither Tommy nor Bradley were making a sound (commonly held to be a bad sign in normally-rambunctious-and-noisemaking children), Mrs. Henderson turned towards them sharply. "How are you kids holding up?" she questioned them curiously, her arms still jealously entwined about the mainmast.

Tommy, snapping out of a wild daydream in which he had been tobogganing down the side of Mount Ice-Cream on a giant chocolate wafer, turned his head toward her unthinkingly. "Oh, don't worry about us, Mrs. Henderson," he yawned distractedly. "We just learnt in Health Class that fat floats, so we can always cling to your dead body if worse comes to worse."

As if a light had switched on inside his head, Tommy gasped at the inappropriateness of his comments in synchrony with Mrs. Henderson, only hers was one of outrage and came fully accessorized with a very tart frown.

"Yoicks," he winced, slapping a hand over his mouth. "I can't believe I just said that."

"Promise you'll never become Prime Minister," Bradley whispered. "We'll be at war within a month of you getting elected, while you stand around scratching your head, going, 'Duh-h, what did I say?'"

"Be that as it may," resumed Mrs. Henderson, not hearing Bradley's remarks and politely choosing to overlook Tommy's, "you'll need to untie each of those sails so we can turn this ship around and steer ourselves back into that thing you hung up on your wall. Well? What are you waiting for? Hop to it!"

"Aye, aye, Captain," they saluted before swiftly getting down to the task.

In the meantime, as she clung steadfastly to the mainmast, Mrs. Henderson nattered wistfully on to herself about how good manners and respect for others had become extinct relics of a sadly bygone era. On she rambled about how even blizzards and seemingly harmless cloth-pictures couldn't be relied upon to behave quite the same as they did when she was growing up.

The rhythmic rocking of the boat did little to soothe her worries that hungry creatures of the deep may be at lurk beneath it. Nor did the hot, golden sun beating down from a misty blue sky stir much improvement if anything, it soon saw her perspiring profusely and padding her face with a blue-spotted handkerchief she managed to ferret out from one of her pockets.

At one point, the terrestrial globe Tommy had been toying with in his room went rolling across the mattress and up against Mrs. Henderson's shoes, and looking down, she beheld something quite miniscule but at the same time highly unusual. "That blip," she observed, her eyes squinting at the globe's glassy surface. "Do you see it?"

Tommy and Bradley, in the midst of untying the last sail from its rigging, glanced over.

"What blip?" enquired Tommy, ready to buckle at the knees under Bradley's weight. With the balls of his feet perched squarely on Tommy's shoulders, the latter was leaning against the foremast, attempting to loosen the knot of the final rope.

"On this globe you have here," Mrs. Henderson threw over her shoulder. "It looks to be a little red marker that keeps flashing. I don't remember it doing that before when you had i in your room. Do you?"

"Hang on, I'll be right back." Tommy told Bradley, and leaving him dangling precariously from the foremast's uppermost yard ("Heigh! What do you think you're doing?"), he stumbled over to see for himself. "It's us," he chimed after picking up the globe and spotting their three smiling faces framed in a small cloudy caption beside the blip. "Don't you see? It's showing where we are now!"

"That's odd," noted Mrs. Henderson, focusing on the names of some of the countries grouped together on a large land mass on the globe. "I never knew there was a country called Mayland before. And these others don't ring a bell with me either: Jaboor, Brigadario, Galphideus, Dalphenny, Addar, Lantris, Wandalia, Caylantra: all countries of a continent called - hoo, I can't even pronounce it - Eukallakue. Have you ever heard of any of those because I sure haven't?"

"Not me," Tommy admitted. "Did you notice? That name Eukallakue or whatever it's spelt exactly the same when you read it backwards."

"Never mind that," grunted Mrs. Henderson, squinting at the globe curiously. "According to this, it looks as if we're smack dab in the middle of something called the South Kaylionic Ocean - and here's another ocean called the North Kaylionic Ocean, oh, and two more: the North and South Icanthic Oceans."

Mrs. Henderson and Tommy both exchanged perplexed glances, neither taking any notice of Bradley's dilemma ("Help, help!"), even after he lost his grip and thudded onto the mattress behind them. After standing and groggily straightening his waistcoat and cap ("Thanks a lot," he spitted indignantly), a squall of wind descended upon their little vessel out of nowhere. Consequently, the foremast's topsail swiftly unravelled whacking him on the head, and down he thumped again.

"What's that squiggly blip there, I wonder?" mused Mrs. Henderson, pointing at an angry little snake in close proximity with their own blip. "lt looks as if it may be heading our way, doesn't it?"

Tommy shrugged. "Search me. This whole globe is lit up with different coloured blips now, so it could be anything."

"Isn't there someway to mark off our current location, so we'll know which way to steer this ship of yours back to if we stray too far off course?" But she might as well have asked the playful breeze respiring against their faces for all the help Tommy's vacant stare could provide her. A sigh escaped her. "Hang on, maybe I brought something along with me." However, a hasty search for her purse only produced a second disappointed sigh. "Wouldn't you know it? It seems I've left everything back at the house."

"Aw-w, great!" Tommy flung at her disdainfully as if she had just committed a federal offence. "A lot of good that does us. Hear that, Bradley? El genius here forgot her purse back at the house."

"What're you blaming me for?" Mrs. Henderson fumed defensively. "I don't exactly carry my purse around with me everywhere I go, and do I look as if I'm anyone's secretary to you?"

Fortunately, it was Bradley who came up with a quick solution to the problem by stepping up behind him and wiping something off his finger onto the red blip blinking steadily beside their diminutive smiling faces.

"Heavens to Betsy!" beamed Mrs. Henderson in relief. "Hand it to Bradley for saving the day. What is that gummy little thing anyway?" she queried, but her thankful smile hastily shaped itself into a suspicious frown after she squinted at Tommy's suddenly quiet and guilty-looking friend and became cognizant of one of his nostrils showing signs it had recently entertained guests.

Snatching up the telescope, she panned the ocean with it. "Botheration,' she sighed in wistful regret, "not a speck of land anywhere in sight. How in the world could any of this have happened?"

"Your guess is as good as ours, I suppose, Mrs. Henderson", Tommy shrugged aimiessly. "One thing's for certain or for sure or whatever: imagining you're a pirate roaming the high seas and actually being one are two completely different things, aren't they?"

"Believe it or not, that's the first sensible thing I've heard all day," she noted, staring ruminatively up at the masthead of the spanker. "Now, I wonder if I might get a clearer view of our surroundings from up there?" she pondered, slipping the telescope under one am. Spitting into her hands and rubbing them together, she grabbed hold of some cleats jutting out the side of the mast that were normally used for tethering ropes.

"W-what are you doing?" protested Tommy in alarm. "You're not thinking of doing what I _think_ you're thinking of doing, are you?"

"Oh-h, would you just relax?" she grumbled. "Goodness me, you're worse than an old woman sometimes. I only want to get a better look at where we are and see what's out there, if that's quite all right with you, Your Highness."

"Suit yourself" heaved Tommy, "but don't say I didn't warn you."

He rolled his eyes and shook his head at Bradley, who seemed to find the whole spectacle of Mrs. Henderson's clumsy climb somewhat laughable, that is, until she lost her footing and came plummeting down onto the mattress.

The force of the fall made the ship sink lower into the water on Mrs. Henderson's side and, at the same time, tilt sharply up on Bradley's, flinging him straight over the side of the deck and down into the sun-glistening ocean.

"Do you see what you've done now-w?" Tommy shouted at her. "Why'd you have to climb up there in the first place? The view isn't any better up there than it is down here, you know."

"It's the kind of view you'll be looking at if you don't zip your lip," she retorted, scrambling to her feet in a seething rage. "Instead of back-talking your elders for no good reason, start looking for something we can throw out to him, maybe a rope or a lifejacket. And while I'm at it you had better get used to the fact that once in a while people slip up."

"Not _this_ badly they don't," countered Tommy, hurriedly scouting the deck for something they might use to rescue Bradley.

"That's enough, do you hear me?" snapped Mrs. Henderson, rummaging about for anything she could find. "I'm fed up to the hilt with that flippant little attitude of yours, and I don't think your grandfather would be too pleased either if I told him how you're behaving."

"How _I'm_ behaving? steamed Tommy in belligerent surprise. 'It wasn't me who got Bradley in trouble, but it looks as if I'm the one who's going to have to get him out of it for all the help you're being!"

"What?!"

"Go ahead and tell Gramps whatever you want. Do you know what he'll say to you? He'll say. Physician heal thyself, that's what, because I'm not the one who's being flippant around here from where I'm standing. And while I'm at it, I can't say as I've ever invited myself over to my neighbours and pigged down fifty bowls of ice-cream that wasn't even mine to begin with, can I, Shnookums?"

If Mrs. Henderson was an enraged bull then Tommy was a matador who had just lost his cape and sword: they bandied about the deck, one in swift pursuit, the other in swifter retreat. Between the masts and along the taffrail she went charging after Tommy, vowing he was going to rue the day he was ever born the second she laid her hands on him until-

"Would you two please cut it out?" came a familiar voice from behind them.

Startled, they turned and spotted Bradley eyeing them quietly as he sat soaked and shivering on the steps leading up to the helm. Puddles of seawater trailed from the edge of the deck where he had clambered back up over the side to safety by himself, and drops showering from the brim of his cap trickled into the dark spaces between the steps. Other than the dishevelled and waterlogged state of his clothes, however, he looked none the worse for wear.

"Bradley!" squealed Mrs. Henderson, hastily hiding a nasty sneer behind an overly angelic smile. "Oh-h, thank goodness you're all right!"

Tommy, too, was smiling and wringing his hands as though he hadn't seen Bradley since they were kindergartners. "We were just trying to figure out a way-"

"Yeah, yeah," frowned Bradley, water dripping into his eyes from the mussed up curls of his periwig. "I heard most of it, so you can just forget about making up some cockamamie story to cover up the fact that you were both bickering about nothing while I was out there fending off man-eating monster fish and drowning!"

"Man-eating monster fish," snuffed Tommy dismissively. "Puh! Do you think we were both born yesterday or something? Why, I doubt there's even a half blind guppy on heart pills within a hundred-billion kilometres of-"

None of them got a really good glimpse at what it was that jumped up out of the water metres away from the bow of their ship then dived back down beneath the surface. Ogopogo, the huge snake-bodied creature with the head of a horse and believed by many to be a longstanding resident of Okanogan Lake in British Columbia, was Tommy and Mrs. Henderson's impression of it.

Despite being turned the other way and having witnessed little more than its fleeting black shadow crossing the deck, Bradley's heart pounded as fast as his fellow crewmates, even more so when the enormous wave it created swept up their ship and carried them swiftly forwards.

Engaged in a spontaneous Mainmast Clinging Contest, seawater spraying against their faces, their eyes gripped shut their tightest, Tommy and Mrs. Henderson listened to the thundering churn of the swell pushing them along at breakneck speed until, losing its momentum at long last, their ship slowed to a bearable crawl.

"I guess that answers your question about that squiggly blip you saw earlier on that globe, doesn't it?" Tommy observed shakily, relaxing his grip and wiping seawater from his eyes.

"Whatever it was, I'm sure glad it didn't stop to say 'Hi' to us."

"Me either," came Bradley's shaky voice above the noise of Mrs. Henderson wringing water from her sopping wet waistcoat and parachute pants.

"Heigh," Tommy blurted, glancing around the deck. "Where'd you go?"

"I'm down here behind the steps," he answered timidly.

"What are you hiding behind there for?" Tommy slung at him in disgust after marching over and discovering Bradley huddled up shivering in a dark corner.

"Maybe it's me, I don't know, but seeing monsters somehow makes me want to hide," he returned in a dizzy, mocking voice that summed up how moronic he thought even asking such a question really was.

"As I recall, you didn't actually see anything." Tommy flouted. "You had your back turned to it all along. Me and Mrs. Henderson were the ones who actually saw it, and do you see us cowering in fear?"

"Can I have your autograph, Mr. Hero?" harpooned Bradley, climbing to his feet. As he did, his arm brushed against an old iron key hanging on a peg.

Leaning forward, Tommy plucked it into his hands. "What's this?" he uttered curiously, showing Bradley the rusty, cannon-shaped object from which three molar-shaped wards jutted out of the barrel.

"H'mm, let me guess," he replied, acting deliberately stupid. Slouching closer beneath the overhanging steps for a better look, the top of his shoulder bumped against a metal door handle. "A baby rattle?'

"I know what it is, knucklehead, but what's it for?"

Thinking Caps on, empty Idea Buckets lowering to the deepest wells of their thoughts, they both lingered before a half-size wood door. "We could always show it to Mrs. Henderson," Bradley suggested finally, but they barely managed to turn and take a single step forward before their shoulders fell victim to a very firm grip and Mrs. Henderson was swivelling them both back round to face the door a second time.

"Good grief, are you kids both blind?" she trilled in disbelief. "Give me that!" she demanded, snatching the key from Tommy's hand and inserting it into the keyhole beneath the door handle. "If you find a key, you look for the nearest keyhole to stick it into instead of pretending you're a couple bumps on a log who don't seem to know their own heads from a hole in the ground. You don't see the bumblebees buzzing up to ask me what in the Sam Hill those pink and purple blossomy things are growing in the garden, do you? And the flies all seem to know what dogs leave behind on the grass without me having to explain anything to them, don't they?

"Now, where does this lead to, I wonder?" she twaddled to herself, pushing the creaky door open and evanescing into the darkness behind it. "Seriously, kids, you've really got to shape up," she resumed, her voice barrelling back out in echoes along with the sound of descending footsteps. "I can't remember a time in my entire life when I was so clued out that I couldn't see that a simple ordinary key was meant to be placed in a simple ordinary keyhole staring you right in the face. Well? Are you coming or do I need to draw you both a diagram?"

Into the dark space they proceeded and down a longer flight of wood steps than either Tommy or Bradley were anticipating in such a small vessel. At the bottom, they could scarcely believe how roomy the space below deck was once their eyes adjusted to the dimmer light provided by small portholes close to the ceiling, fearnoughts bunched above them.

"Whoa, what's wrong with this picture?" marvelled Bradley, casting puzzled glances about a hold that belonged, unquestionably, to a much larger ship.

Curved wood slats extended twenty feet back to an old provisions cabinet stained in a shiny charcoal black and which consisted of gold-trimmed cupboards both above and below a small wood counter. Two sets of double-decker bunk beds hugged the starboard and portside walls and as many rope hammocks hung between the mast posts jutting up through the garboards from the keel.

"Weird," Tommy seconded, despite feeling warmed by the patchwork quilts covering the beds and the red-, black- and grey-striped runner between them. "Definitely weird."

Mrs. Henderson, having just lit an old copper lantern on a square table at the far end surrounded by four chairs, smiled most pleasantly. "There we are," she exhaled bracingly, looking around. "Well, now, there certainly seems enough room for us down here, that's for sure."

"But, well, I mean, don't you think it's a bit strange, Mrs. Henderson?" questioned Bradley.

"Strange?" she repeated, whipping her gaze nervously in his direction. "What do you mean?"

"That there's way more room down here than there really ought to be," he responded slowly.

"After all the things that have happened to me today, who cares?" she waved him off. "I hauled out the garbage this morning in the middle of a raging blizzard, and here I am a few hours later bobbling merrily along in the middle of an ocean. Why should it matter if anything seems a little off-compass anymore? I'm not denying that there's a lot more breathing room down here than we anticipated, or that it may even smell a little bit _ratty_. All the same, it's a nice cozy spot where-"

"What was that?"

Tommy and Bradley had heard it too - a short, high-pitched squeal of alarm that seemed to have originated from the provisions cabinet.

In frozen, wary silence, they all stared at the two top cupboard doors until Mrs. Henderson approached the cabinet as softly as a cat, paused momentarily, then whisked the cupboards open. Before he actually crept forward with Bradley and saw for himself what was in the cupboard, for something there was, Tommy heard two horrified shrieks: a gargantuous, ear-splitting bellow from Mrs. Henderson and something quite rodential to say the least.

In the shadows, the small, hunched-up figure of a long-whiskered rat turned to face them and a set of black, rheumy eyes peered at them overtop some half-moon spectacles. The flowing purple cloak and long tasselled cap in which this unusual creature was apparelled could not disguise the fact that he was shivering in fright, one paw pressed up against his chest, the other clasping something that very much resembled a bent up wand.

"Dear, dear, madam!" he wheezed breathlessly. "I daresay whinging open cupboards and screaming at the top of ones lungs is the perfect way to do away with anyone in possession of as bad a heart as mine, isn't it?"

"That sounds like a complaint to me," declared Mrs. Henderson, slamming the cupboard shut with a flick of her hand, "and more complaints," she added, looking pointedly at Tommy, "I don't need."

"But don't you realize what you've just done, Mrs. Henderson?" Bradley objected. "You've just slammed the cupboard door shut on a talking-"

"Look, if you're going to start in on me too, there's another cupboard right beside this one that's all yours. You kids have been on my case from the second I stepped into Tommy's room to tell Bradley about us being zonked-in by that blizzard, and I am not going to listen to another word!"

"But-"

"Not one syllable!" she boomed warningly. "I don't care if there's a purpile polka-dotted elephant in that cupboard that can make a banana fudge sundae with its eyes closed. I've had all the negativity I can stand for one day, and I absolutely refuse to tolerate anymore of it!"

At this point, a very curious roar emanated from within the cupboard that sounded as though it may have come from exactly the sort of floppy-eared, long-snouted animal Mrs. Henderson had just described.

"Why, there is a purple polka-dotted elephant in that cupboard Mrs. Henderson!" blurted Bradley, sharing an amazed glance with Tommy, who gabbled out:

"Dare we look to see if it's in there making a banana fudge sundae with its eyes closed?"

"Ah, ah, ah!" protested Mrs. Henderson, stepping in front of them. "I will do the honours if you don't mind."

"No fair! If it really is in there making a banana fudge sundae, then why should you be the one who gets to eat it?"

"Because I can throw you down on the ground and stomp all over you easier than you can me," she stated smugly. "Besides that," she blustered quickly as they scuttled around her to beat her to the cupboard anyway, "I'm the eldest, the wisest and the hungriest - get away from there! That banana sundae's mine!"

Actually opening the cupboard door again became all-out war that included pushing and shoving each other out of the way, tickling tactics and very rude hip-bashing techniques. At last, the cupboard door swung ajar and they were disappointed to see the same hunched-up figure as before, this time blowing his nose into a carnation white handkerchief, the source of the baby-elephant noises apparently.

"Ah-h, back again, are we?" he sniffed in a jovial manner. "Do please allow me to introduce myself, if you will. Hannon O'Grady, none other, madam and sirs."

Hastily shoving the handkerchief back into his pocket, he turned to unleash a gregarious smile on them and cordially extended his wand-free paw, evidently expecting to shake their hands. The reaction this gesture received was at best lukewarm, Mrs. Henderson squinting judgmentally at a set of obviously nibbled on claw nails, which dived hastily behind his back with a self-conscious chuckle, Tommy nudging Bradley to point out a smile that also went into hiding when he whispered, "Ew-w, plaque!"

Pleasantries aside, Mrs. Henderson got right to the point. "I don't care who you are," she scowled, "or who you say you are or how much nonsense you expect us to believe. What I want to know is who put you up to this? Are you a puppet?" she demanded, checking the cupboard for strings. "Is somebody hiding in the bottom cupboard?"

"Madam, madam, madam, I assure you, I am neither puppet nor prankster. I am merely the unfortunate subject of a magical spell that has transformed me into the senescent but distinguished rodent you see standing before you now."

"Do you honestly expect us to believe that?" she challenged him heatedly.

"You may believe what you wish, madam, for there exists neither wand nor magician powerful enough to alter what anyone thinks, is there? I will say I have a commitment to telling the truth to all who do not choose to hold the truth against me, but as it is not within my power to convince anyone of anything I am loathe to even make an attempt."

"So who did this to you?" solicited Tommy, inciting a weary, wistful sigh from the stowaway.

"My own greed and blind stupidity, I suppose," Hannon recounted regretfully as he toyed with a small tassel at the end of his cap. "The truth of the matter is, the spell was set upon me by a sword I bewitched myself, then willingly handed over to an evil pirate named Captain Farleigh Green, the worst of the worst of the high seas. He and his infamous crew pillaged without scruple the vessels of many a ship, and used my own capabilities as a sorcerer to assist in defeating his fiercest enemies over the years. His unquenchable thirst for riches brought them ashore to swarm and raid the heavily-guarded palaces of Jaboorian queens and Addarian sultans. But I wearied of furthering my involvement a day longer in the unscrupulous dealings of his senseless skulduggery, and at lastinformed him I would be taking my leave.

"He endeavoured to convince me not to abandon him when he needed me most, but my mind was made up. As I turned to go, he suddenly offered me one half of the entire treasure he had managed to accumulate in exchange for some of the powers I possessed, and I, in my infinite wisdom, agreed. I enchanted his sword with a modest but useful store of magic, never expecting for a moment that he would attempt to use it against me. But use it he did, with a laughable degree of ineptitude, I must say.

"After rendering harmless the dozen or so jinxes he threw at me, I decided to teach him a lesson by changing him into the rat he undeniably is, forgetting, perhaps, that he is an expert swordsmen whose reflexes are lightning swift.

"Quite unexpectedly, he swung his sword out in front of him. The hex deflected off its steely blade and struck me square in the chest, and the rat you see before you now barely escaped with his life.

"Into the Medusa's treasure-filled hold I fled, where I eluded capture by the men he sent down to hunt me out. Foolishly leaping through a tiny porthole I thought was a crack in the ship's hull, I landed in the ocean, where, having crawled up onto a piece of driftwood, I have been floating aimlessly about longer than I care to recall.

"So wretchedly exhausted was I from the entire ordeal, I hadn't one inkling that your ship was even afoot until I happened to bash up against the side of it. I clambered in through one of the portholes at the height of an argument two of you were engaged in on deck and wended my way down here into this cupboard. But it is providence and providence alone that has thrown me aboard your vessel- which, I must admit, seems abominably small for a voyage of any length."

"Okay, okay, I'm getting used to the idea that talking rats exist," Tommy admitted. "But if you're trying to convince me that you can perform magical feats then I'm definitely going to need a little proof."

"I reckon I can always try," Hannon offered reluctantly. "It's my wand, you see. I am not altogether certain it has fully dried out from being in the ocean so many days, and one must admit it does look somewhat seasick at present and in frightful need of a holiday."

"Excuses, excuses," Bradley snorted. "Come on, get on with it. If you say you can do magic, we want to see."

'Very well, very well," Hannon sighed, waving a furry brown paw at them. "Stand aside, if you will, stand aside."

Obediently shuffling to one side of the cabinet, Mrs. Henderson impatiently shoo-shooed Tommy and Bradley off to the other side given that both were still plying Hannon with gormless, expectant smiles in the same spots, ears obviously plugged and overdue for a good cleaning.

Clearing his throat importantly, the tottery old rat stepped to the edge of the cupboard. He straightened his posture and inhaled a deep breath. He raised his wand dramatically in the air, took careful aim, but at that exact moment his spectacles slid down his whiskery snout and wanted nudging into place again.

Overlooking a bout of amused snickering from Tommy and Bradley, he lifted his wand again, pointed it at the table and gave it a flick. Things, however, did not seem to turn out the way he intended them to. Apparently forgetting how abysmally bent up his wand was, he gasped in alarm as bluish sparks struck the neighbouring cupboard to his immediate left. "Oh, dear," he exclaimed, "I don't think that was supposed to happen at all."

The unopened cupboard beside which Mrs. Henderson was now standing had already begun to tremble and shake. With barely time to twist their heads in the cupboard's direction, its door burst open and a great pile of dead fish cascaded overtop of her.

Flouncing to the floor and wailing in horror, off to the other side of the hold she slid, gagging nauseously as she straightened herself up from a sizeable quantity of what might well have been kippers coated liberally in a thick, viscous slime.

"Get out the barf bags, somebody," sang Tommy. "If there's one thing Mrs. Henderson can't stand, it's the smell of fish. I think she told me it also makes her suskeptible or whatever to violent mood swings. In other words, you'd better do something awful quick or things could get real ugly."

"My profoundest apologies, madam," Hannon called to her nervously, this time holding his wand sideways and waving the twisted-up point of it at Mrs. Henderson. Unfortunately, the bluish sparks that wisped across the room and enveloped her in sparkles caused her already sensitve nose to triple in size.

"Not good," winced Tommy. "Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, not good at all. Still that doesn't mean you need to get yourself wound up into an almighty tizzy or anything, Mr. O'Grady. Being a rat means you can always squeeze yourself into a hole in the wall where you'll be safe once she starts frothing at the mouth and smashing things up." While speaking he scanned the hold for a suitable refuge for the now quivering Mr. O'Grady. "Like that one over - oh, that's just a shadow, so maybe not there. H'mmm, how about in that dark space underneath the cupboard, oh, never mind, it's actually wood that's painted black so it only looks like a space, doesn't it? Heigh, do you want to know something, Mr. O'Grady? I really don't think there are any holes you can hide in, at least none that I can see."

This hardly came as welcome news, seeing how Mrs. Henderson had just turned a very dangerous glare on Hannon, who frantically waved his wand in haste a third time, so restoring her nose to its normal size, but also producing an affect on the fish he obviously hadn't planned. One by one, they popped into puffy little clouds which soon collected on the ceiling into something more ominous and sinister.

"Isn't that something?" Tommy remarked, gaping at deep-rumbling flashes crossing the ceiling. "l sure wish I could change a bunch of slimy dead fish into a whole entire thundercloud just by waving a magic wand at them. Seems as if it's growing and growing and growing, doesn't it?"

"It is, it is, it is!" squirmed Hannon, his level of anxiety heightening even further. "It appears I may have unintentionally invoked a thunderstorm spell instead of simply making the fish vanish as I was intending. Quickly, quickly! Cut along and open up the door at the top of the steps to clear it out of the hold, will you? And while you're up there it may be good advice to hoist the sails as well in light of the fact we are likely in for a spell of nasty weather."

Aye, aye, Mr. O'Grady," Tommy saluted him. "Come on, Bradley. Let's roll up our sleeves and batten down the hatches or whatever."

Attaining the stairs was almost impossible; the dense steamy haze filled the compartment fast, and Tommy could only determine that Bradley was close behind him by the sound of his scuffing heels. Reaching them at last, he fumbled his way to the top and flung open the half-sized door, shunting Bradley clear of the thick white plumes that came billowing out of the hold as though froman exploding volcano. Floating upwards into the sky, they expanded swiftly into pitchy, inhospitable clouds overhead, churning up winds so fierce that unkind waves soon replaced every silvery ripple glimmering tranquilly on the ocean's surface. As their diligent faces darkened in the shadow of the quickly-expanding clouds, Tommy and Bradley hastened to hoist the flapping sails back up to their riggings - not an easy thing to do in the rapidly mounting winds - and tie their respective ropes tightly to the sides if the masts. About to return inside, Bradley laid a hand on Tommy's shoulder and directed his attention toward the terrestrial globe lying askew on the mattress.

"Wait, we should bring that with us, along with that compass and telescope, shouldn't we? We don't want them to get washed overboard; they might come in handy."

These he ran and collected while Tommy hurriedly bundled up the pillows in the two blankets lying crumpled on the mattresses. With these in hand, they escaped the first torrential drops of a thunderous storm neither could believe had overtaken the skies so swiftly and at the weeest flick of a sorcerer's wand no bigger than the tail of the elderly rat it belonged to.

-more coming (11 chapters plus prologue)

-14 volumes in the series (7 done) with music, poetry and a complete language .

-hope you like it so far!


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